Water Behind Us: Chapter 5 (Summer)

Chapter 5: Summer

Some evenings in the late summer, I would stop on a walk through our neighborhood and take in the light coming over the brick homes; a reddish-orange light of warmth, not heat, that filled me with a sense of place. It was that light that filled my town on the day we left for New York, and wondered why I was leaving.

Father sat in the breakfast room, quietly angry. It was the predictable end of a drawn-out and tiring discussion about my relationship with Lisa. "What I want," he said without turning, "is for you to be happy."

"I am happy. What I want," I said as I left the room and finished packing my bags, "is for you to be happy with it, too." I didn't turn to see his expression.

Tension had grown between us for several weeks since Mark's funeral, though I suspected that not all of the tension was caused by my relationship with Lisa. He had been spending even more time at work, and had seemed irritable when he returned. Something was going wrong, but he refused to discuss it with me.

The trip was Lisa's idea. We were to go to New York, and had plans to stay with one of Lisa's college roommates. The second week of September seemed the perfect time to visit the city, with the residents returned from their summer retreats. I had spent some time in New York before, with mixed reviews, but looked forward to the opportunity to escape from the tension at home. The time alone with Lisa would be good for both of us, I concluded, as the other pressures in our lives were beginning to affect our treatment of one another. Lisa, after a hard day, often seemed cold or nasty, while I was unmotivated, according to her.

I said a cold good-bye to my father on my way out the door to O'Hare as the sun sunk over the horizon, but was stopped by his arm before I could reach the door.

"I'm going to be out of town for the next few days, Buddy, and maybe more. I don't want you to take any major new assignments until I come back, OK?"

"Sure, Pop," I replied distantly. "Why the sudden urge to travel?"

"It's just business, Buddy. Just like always. Just business." The tone in his voice told me that he did not want to discuss the issue, so I simply backed out the door, my luggage over my shoulder. We had lost the openness and confidence of the fall, and he seemed unwilling to discuss anything beyond the schedule for the day. Others at the firm had asked me about it; apparently, the general impression at the office was that his position, and the attendant stress, had finally gotten to him.

* * *

As we took off from the O'Hare runway, I put the issue of my father behind me and made a silent promise to myself to concentrate on Lisa. As the wheels drew into the fuselage with an audible bump, I took her hand and again felt the warmth that I had first felt at the Thanksgiving dinner.

The taxi ride into the city from LaGuardia was a bad omen. The driver, surprisingly, spoke English well and knew the route to the Upper West Side address at which we would be staying. The traffic was horrendous, however, and we could feel the tension rachet upward as we adjusted to an environment even faster-paced than that to which we were accustomed in Chicago. As we prepared to exit the cab at the entrance to the apartment, the cab driver announced that the fare was the $24 listed on the meter plus a $5 "baggage charge."

"There's no baggage charge. You can't do that," Lisa protested from outside of the cab.

"Whatever, kids, you decide. You don't want to pay the baggage charge, that's okay with me. You'll just buy some new baggage. You're rich kids, right?"

The driver sat resolutely in his seat looking at us expectantly. Lisa leaned back into the cab to see his identification, which he removed from the dash before she could position herself so as to look at it. The identification card that should have been in the sleeve facing the back seat was missing as well. Lisa, furious, said, "Fine. We'll pay. Just get our luggage out."

The cabbie slowly shook his head. "Cash first, honey."

Lisa glared at him through the window before handing over the money. He then unlocked the trunk and made a broad bowing gesture before returning to his seat, leaving us to haul our own bags out of the rear compartment.

Standing on the curb as the cab sped off, I said, "I hate getting gypped. I'd rather spend my five bucks somewhere else."

Lisa was livid. "It's not the money that burns me. It's the dishonesty, and the,... the breach of manners. This is the first impression of the city for a lot of people, and this guy just doesn't give a damn. He wants his five bucks and he doesn't care who he takes it from. Damn him!" Something about her anger turned me on.

Lisa’s friend met us at the front door of the apartment before rushing off to do something downtown. She grabbed me by both shoulders upon our introduction.

“Have you been to New York before, Buddy?”

I shook my head.

“It’s a city of brilliant moments. Somebody said that once, not me,” and with that she was gone, running down the hallway.

We spent the first evening in New York walking from north to south and east to west, finally returning to glimpse the top of the Empire State Building, the dome of which was washed in cold blue light to celebrate a Mets victory.

Our second day in New York was not so blissful. We slept until ten, finally slogging into the kitchen to forage for breakfast in the small pantry adjacent to the infintesimile kitchen, as Lisa’s friend slept even longer. The morning broke, for us, with a slight drizzle falling and a grey pall both below and above us. We tried to make coffee in our hosts' aging Mr. Coffee, failing as the water leaked down the back of the machine rather than through the filter. "I need coffee," Lisa told me, directively.

I went down to the bodega on the corner, a secret and foreign world filled with Vienna sausages, Goya brand wax beans and Ben & Jerry's ice cream, and retrieved two hot cups of coffee. Coffee had taken a liking to me after that evening with my father, and the caffeine hook was firmly set in my maw.

At the table, Lisa played with a small wooden abacus that had been sitting on a nearby shelf. Flipping a bead from right to left and back again, she caught my eye as I looked around the apartment. "Are we going to make it, Buddy?"

What a question-- there was only one right answer, but I didn't have it so firmly set inside me that I could say it. "I hope so. We will if we don't blow it."

Lisa shook her head. She suddenly seemed very solemn and directed. "You don't get it. I'm taking risks if we go any further, and I just want to know if it's worth it."

Crumpling the top of my paper coffee cup, I said, "What risks, Lisa? You think I'm going to turn into some sort of a dangerous psycho? I may have been a little wired after the whole thing with Mark, but I've gotten over that some more now. Don't worry, I'm not going to do anything goofy, if that's what you mean,... or what do you mean?"

"I mean that if we keep up with this, we're going to have to put it in front of our parents and see how we all deal with it. If I love somebody, I want him to be there for the Passover Seder, you know? I feel like I'm hiding you."

"I would have gone to the Seder, but you didn't invite me."

"Of course I didn't invite you," Lisa said, her voice rising, "I didn't want to mess everything up right away. I'm just saying that we're going to have to deal with that, and when we do we're going to have to figure out what we're going to say about the entire topic of religion. I'm a Jew, Buddy, and that's not going to change. I want to know if my children are going to go to church or what. I don't think that I could take that, my children going to church, because in my eyes they are going to be Jewish. So what would happen? Would you just go off on Sunday to church by yourself, or what?"

Her position seemed so firm, so unilateral and unyielding. "This is really out of the blue, isn't it? All of a sudden we're having children now? Besides, if it is your child and my child, why is it automatically Jewish? It seems to me like you would have a child from a Jewish-Christian family."

"That's not how it works, Buddy. You know that that wouldn't work."

"What do you mean 'it wouldn't work'? And, I don't get the whole thing where children are born with a religion. I mean, kids don't believe anything, and religion is beliefs, right? You grow up with things, and then you believe it, but you aren't born anything, right? If our kid decides to be Jewish, that's fine, and if she decides to be Methodist, or Christian-something else, or Hindu, or whatever, then that's what she is, right? How can you be born with a theology?"

Lisa was beginning to turn red as an edge of fire crept into her voice. "That's the problem, isn't it? You see your little religion as something you choose from the menu, but to me it's like, ... it's an identity you're born with. You can't just stop being Jewish. You can't..."

She just didn't see the unfairness of it-- the inequity of having it all her way, nullifying my "little religion." There was enough out there nullifying me already; I needed an ally, not this. I cut her off, pounding the table with my hand, palm down so as to make the loudest possible noise. "It's the whole ugly "Chosen People" thing, isn't it? Do you ever think about what it's like to be unchosen and hear people talk about that?"

It was Lisa's turn to interrupt. "If you hate my religion, if you hate what I am, then why are you with me? Tell me that."

"I never said that I hated Jews, Lisa. I just don't get the whole bit about kids being assigned a religion at birth and that being it. Why would God just 'choose' some people for special treatment? I know it's hard to see if you happen to be in the special group, but what about the rest of it? What about the multitudes? They asked to come, and got turned down. So is that what God thinks of the rest of us? Doesn't it all seem a little tribal to have your own special God?"

Lisa's voice was tempered with steel and she stood up abruptly from the table. "Don't give me that line, Buddy. I know you're hung up on the whole chosenness thing, but you just don't get it. It just means a special role, just like all the other kinds of people. That's why it's important, the whole thing about children. Because I would be their mother, they would be Jewish, and I would want to give them a Jewish education. I don't see what the big problem is with that, Buddy. You just can't stand the fact that you would have Jewish children."

"Why wouldn't they be half-Jewish? Why can't they be whatever the hell they want?"

"Buddy, you can't choose your parents, you can't choose which religious education your parents give you. Whether you call it chosenness or whatever, it's still the same thing, Buddy. You go to your parent's church and you learn who God is-- he's Jesus, right? He's not Buddha or Krishna or anything else. So what's the difference? I don't get it-- what's the difference between you being like your parents, and me being Jewish like my parents?"

I felt as if my head were going to explode. "Why do we have to decide all this, Lisa? We're not about to have children this year, okay? We won't be having any little anythings around for a while. Let's just sit and be quiet, let this settle down, all right?"

The two of us sat, steaming for a full five minutes. I looked at, without seeing, the newspaper I had brought with the coffee.

I had imagined that I would one day bring it up when we were driving down a pleasant, tree-shaded highway in the fall, or late at night sitting by the ocean. It was out of a desire to shove the monster back into the bag and save it for that other day that I had stopped the conversation; I knew that I had no answers, only more problems and unanswerable questions.

When I feel overwhelmed by a problem, I get the urge to clean-- glass, tabletops, bathrooms, whatever is nearby. Something to do with my hands, I guess. I began to clean the apartment as Lisa sat there, still glowering into her coffee, but with the edge of anger dulled by the silence in the room. For a full ten minutes she just watched me, and I watched her watching me as I cleaned. I crumpled the greek temples on the paper coffee cups and threw them away, then picked up the scraps of newspaper I had left on the table. Finding a broom in the tiny closet, I swept the kitchen and dining area, scraping the dirt into the palm of my hand. Finally, I grabbed the sponge on the sink and scrubbed the kitchen surfaces, bearing down hard with the heel of my palm, not turning to face her.

I felt so far from her-- it was as if I could walk and walk and still not feel the warmth of her skin.

I put my hands on the back of her chair and whispered in her ear, "let's not be the first couple to break up over theology, okay?" I knew the sarcasm in my voice was sharp.

Leaning back, she looked up into my eyes and said, her voice still steely, "we wouldn't be."

As the drizzle continued, we sat in silence and pretended to read the sections of the paper which I had not thrown away. There was a slow thaw, though; we both were unable to maintain the anger for long.

Quietly, pragmatically, we decided to head out to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, getting lunch on the way. Silence hung over us as we walked past brownstones, stopping occasionally to read plaques marking the homes as consulates, United Nations Missions, or Doctor's offices. Silence bred a sort of unspoken truce, as our easy familiarity snuck into our words and the anger faded. As we walked up the steps of the Metropolitan the beauty of the moment struck me-- The grandness of walking through the doors into the central lobby of the museum on a rainy day hit, the muted light, the sound of the murmuring people, our fingertips touching. To our right, the well-heeled and those of less substantial means sat together on wooden benches, waiting to meet friends or simply taking a rest. Others streamed past us, with olive raincoats and dripping umbrellas.

Having paid our admission, we decided to eschew a map and simply wander the maze of hallways and galleries. In support of our new detente, I waited patiently while Lisa meandered through the antiquities, while Lisa tolerated my new-found obsession with Elizabethan furniture. The tension that was so evident in the morning was happily suspended, replaced by a comfortable sleepiness enhanced by the quietness of the museum.

One hall held portraits from the early days of the republic: Stoic-looking men in high collars, and wise women with calm eyes. Looking at a painting of an early American patriot, Lisa called me over with the slightest of gestures, the movement of her fingers by her side. The patriot looked stern but kind, expressing a sort of potential for courage. The gilt frame and the single yellow light over the picture enhanced the effect of the purposefullness of the face. Lisa cocked her head slightly as she looked at the painting. "He looks so stoic. There's something there, something almost political, like the painter did the portrait to make a political point, and did it just by giving him a look in his eye."

I stood behind her and looked at the portrait, perhaps one of the most obscure works in the museum. "People would laugh at that today, say, if you were to paint a political portrait of Al Gore or somebody like that. If you give your art that sort of a political point now, it's not art anymore. Maybe they teach that in art school."

Without looking back at me, Lisa nodded, and I put my hand on the back of her shirt, a light, impulsive, almost imperceptible touch. The moment of connection, even over such a mundane point, felt good after the argument of the morning. The link between the tempestuous, dangerous morning and the quiet, pacific mid-day we had shared was lost in the coolness of the hallways. It almost seemed as if the first day had ended, a blazing red sun fading angrily in the West, and a new, softer-edged day had arrived when we came into the museum. As we walked into the next gallery we did not hold hands, but as we walked, our fingertips grazed one another. The gray stone was warm to us, welcoming and guiding and accepting.

We lost track of the time, and as we left, the clock in the lobby indicated that it was almost closing time. We agreed to go back to the apartment before seeking out dinner, to rest. Though we had risen late and spent the day in the museum, there was a persistent tiredness in both of us, and at the apartment we slept for two hours, awaking after the sun had set, to be replaced again outside of the window by the blue dome of the Empire State Building.

Outside of the window, underneath the view of the Empire State Building, an apartment was bathed in the blue light of a television, and the sight of the woman in the apartment watching television alone brought to me the image of the family I had served with their eviction papers. Watching Lisa as she slept, I spoke to her.

"We're both worthy of love." Still she slept, and I watched the rise and fall of her chest, like the waves on a beach.

"I like my job," I said softly, looking out the window, "but sometimes it makes me see things I'd rather not-- that I'm going to end up like that family in front of the television, or like Mark, caught in some kind of craziness on the street. The woman I served with her papers, she didn't look at me once, she didn't need to, and there wasn't anything, anything, she could do about me being there, about the rent not being paid or the money not coming in. It's not that I felt sorry for her, it's more like I felt that I could see why she did what she did; there was nothing else she could do right then, I guess, with me in her house, standing behind her and her kids."

I had always thought that there was a sort of ethereal sexiness about her when she first awoke, a feeling she did not understand. Her hair uncombed, her eyes half open, she did not see the attractiveness that I did as she shlumped around the apartment in her sweats. She saw me looking at her, and mumbled, "Don't tell me about how great I look again. I don't think it's very funny."

I watched her as she changed into a blue dress, washed her face, and put on earrings. When she was almost ready, I put on an old pair of olive pants and a short-sleeve shirt. "So what do we do now?"

"Now we eat," she responded, "and I have an idea for a place. We have to take the subway downtown."

I locked the door as we left and put the keys in my pocket; as I stepped away from the door I realized that the phone was ringing. Hurriedly, I fumbled for the key to unlock the door again. Finally, the door gave way as the phone ended its last ring, and I picked up the receiver to hear only a dial tone.

Lisa laughed at my plight. "So much cruelty in this world." We headed out the door into the blue-gray night and walked through the warm air to the subway station. The day in the museum had, strangely, felt like autumn, while in the twilight the air was noticeably laden with the scent and humidity of the summer. The streets were full of people, some of them looking purposefully towards an undefined destination while others seemed to simply be waiting for someone or something. Music flowed out of cars, a jambalaya of hip-hop, rock, and dance music.

The restaurant Lisa lead me to was in an old warehouse, an enormous interior space filled with tables set at different elevations. We entered through large wooden doors set with glass, revealing the throngs inside. It was a scene reeking of energy, as the pulse of hundreds of conversations joined one another in the wooden beams and rafters above to form one continuous roar which provided an aural signature. At the far end of the restaurant was an enormous bar, and above it an equally monumental mural which depicted the fall of Hades.

As the pony-tailed host lead us to our table in the middle of the flux and roar, I leaned close to Lisa. "If Chicago is the city of Big Shoulders, this is the city of Big Restaurants."

"Buddy, stop being so Midwestern," Lisa implored, sitting across from me at the round table. I looked out over the enormous floor, towards the large windows facing the street where a man pushed a shopping cart against a car while being restrained by a smaller man. I could see that he was yelling, but could not hear the words, which were swallowed up by the din inside and the wall of plate glass.

Our meals arrived in large porcelain bowls, the green and red of the sauces staining the cold off-white of the bowls. The waiter accidentally brought us someone else's wine, which was better than what we had chosen. The red wine, a chianti, had a hard edge to it which played off of the roar of the diners, the texture of the pasta, and the pace of the day.

We talked about the city as we ate, and about the cities we had seen. As the check came, she leaned over the table towards me and touched my hand, then rose from her seat. As we left the restaurant, I put my hand near hers, and again our fingertips brushed lightly as we walked. As we approached the corner, I took her hand fully, her fingers reaching through mine and towards my palm.

As we turned the corner onto 5th, I saw it happening, knew it would happen, and felt my stride adjust to halting half-steps. I stopped on the sidewalk. Following the line of my eyesight, Lisa saw what I saw; a woman coming towards us with a wry smile. She was an older woman, taller and more angular than Lisa, but with a similar forceful stride. As she approached, my face froze in a half-smile. I had feared this day.

The woman came close to us, stopped and crossed her arms. "Buddy. How are you?" She was not smiling.

For a moment, I nodded. "Pretty good." She looked at us expectantly, sensing and enjoying my discomfort; she had always enjoyed confrontation. "Lisa, this is Sarah. From Washington. We used to work together."

We had worked together, and much more. We had separated in a storm of recriminations, both declaring that the other had ruined our lives. It had knocked me back; she was what had set me reeling back home to my father's house and a job far below what others thought I should be doing.

Lisa took on a hardened look as the facts of the situation came together in her mind. "It's nice to meet you, Sarah. I've heard a lot about you." There was an edge in her voice.

"That's interesting, because I haven't heard from Buddy in over a year. We used to be quite close, actually. So are both of you living... where?"

"Chicago," Lisa said.

"Yeah, Chicago. The toddlin'town," I chimed in a little too anxiously. "I'd forgotten how to toddle after that year in D.C. Ha ha. Joke, Sarah. You never got my jokes."

The older woman ignored me. "That's where I thought you would go when you left the Hill. Back home to Mom and Dad. Or Dad, anyways. I'm sure that you'll be going back to school soon, if you haven't already. That's what most of them do, you know," she said, looking briefly at Lisa, "when they bail out of real life."

Lisa looked at me as she stood next to Sarah, her eyes narrowing. There was a tense silence as I nodded rhythmically, unable to think of what to say. "You look like you lost some weight, Buddy," Sarah continued, "is this your new girlfriend?"

"We're out here... we know each other... sure, yeah, this is my girlfriend. Lisa's my girlfriend."

Sarah turned towards Lisa, a conspiratorial glint in the edges of her eyes. "Listen to me, honey. Don't make the mistake I did and let him ruin your life. I was too patient. Don't make the same mistake. He's going nowhere."

Sarah flipped her hair over her shoulder and continued down the street as I watched her go, stunned at her attempt to sabotage my life. Expecting empathy, I looked to Lisa, who was turned away from me. Sharply, she turned towards me, her face a blank.

"What?"

Still she stood looking at me, her eyes not meeting mine but resting in the middle distance.

"Lisa, what is it? That relationship is not us. Sarah isn't you. We're not in trouble. We're getting better, Lisa."

Slowly her eyes began to focus and met mine. "She's right about one thing. About patience. I know you're not going to try to see things my way. Why should I wait?" The question was not directed at me, but rather hung in the air for her own consideration. Her doubts had found something to propel them.

I could comprehend Lisa's question even less than Sarah's comments. "I didn't do anything to her. We went out, it didn't work out, so we ended it. I told you about her."

Lisa began to walk quickly up Broadway. "It's not her, Buddy. It's us."

Walking behind her, I talked to the back of her head. "She wanted a commitment, I didn't give it to her, okay? What's the big deal? Why is this such a big deal?"

Lisa spun so quickly that I bumped into her. "It's not just this, Buddy. It's everything. You think you just have it made, and you don't respect people. You don't really care how I feel, you just want to beat me in an argument, like this morning. I can't take this anymore." With that, she began to run through the crowds on the sidewalk.

I began to run, feeling the cracks and the trash on the pavement beneath my sneakers. I chased her through Union Square, and across 22nd street, where a graffiti-covered van missed me by inches as it sped down the street. Stepping back from the path of the van, I lost sight of her, and when I straightened up, she was out of sight. I hadn't remembered her being so fast. Scanning the street, I saw only closed and locked storefronts, one of the ubiquitous Ray's Pizza joints, and the entrance to a nightclub, where burly bouncers stood at the door behind a red velvet rope. I ran to the corner beyond the nightclub and looked both ways down the cross street, but caught no glimpse of her.

Calculating that she must have taken refuge in the nightclub, I rushed up to the bouncers. "Did a blond woman, short, come in here about... just now?" I inquired breathlessly.

One of the beefy men adjusted his belt and looked down the steps at me. "We don't see nothing. We just work here, look at I.D.'s. We don't see nothing. Don't ask."

I looked long and hard at the young bodybuilder, who simply stared back at me, apparently experienced at this game. The scene, the iron faced bouncers, was familiar from my night with Mark.

Finally, I paid my admission and went into the club in search of Lisa.

The lights in the nightclub almost blinded me, and at first I stepped backwards into the doorway. A spinning ball reflected glancing rays towards me, and I turned away towards the bar at the right side of the room. Walking behind the line of stools, I saw no one like Lisa. These people were so different than her-- wearing spandex and set expressions. Panic was nibbling at the back of my neck, and I bolted from the club past the bemused bouncers, and headed further up Broadway at a run. The street suddenly seemed deserted, and I could hear my footfalls echo in the dirty doorways. A cab bounced towards me slowly, passing through the night with its lights turned off. As I approached 28th street, I slowed to a walk, my exhaustion catching up with me, and I slumped against a wall, my chest heaving. I was out of shape.

Leaning against the cool brick, I tried to think of what Lisa would do. She was a walker; in the midst of previous fights she had cleared her head by going for a long walk. She was not the type to take a cab, even in New York. I guessed that she was walking back to the apartment; the best way to find her would be to do the same and hope to catch a glimpse of her. I continued up Broadway, the most logical route, stopping at each cross street to look either direction in the hope that she would be in the distance.

As I turned the corner towards the apartment, I hoped to see her sitting on the stoop in front of the building. I closed my eyes as I turned the corner, visualizing her there, then opened them. No one sat there; in fact, the entire street seemed eerily vacant given the constant foot traffic of earlier in the evening. I opened the front door and climbed up the stairs. I paused again before unlocking the door, hoping that she would be there when I swung the door open. I turned the key, turned the knob, and pushed, standing silently before the tiny apartment. The chairs, the couch, the apartment, was empty.

I closed the door and dropped my tired body down on the pilled and cat-urine scented fabric of the old couch. A horror reared within me, a coming together of the fear that Lisa had been attacked on the streets, that she had hurt herself, and that she had struck out in search of Sarah.

I had simply left Washington, taking my things out of her apartment while she was at work, without explanation or apology. I had left before thinking of why, and had not allowed myself to focus on my action after returning to Chicago. Even Mark had been spared my feelings.

I again fell asleep, my arm trailing off of the couch onto the floor. At two in the morning, I was awakened by the ringing of the telephone. I slowly rolled off the couch and oriented myself. The phone was not in sight, and my senses were serving me poorly. I rubbed my eyes and on my hands and knees crawled towards the sound. The phone was under some newspapers, where I had left it in my last rush to answer. I knocked it over and put the receiver to my ear only to once again hear a dial tone. Holding the phone, I sat on the floor and stared at it until a loud beeping tone instructed me to hang up. Dazed and obedient, I replaced the receiver.

Standing now, I pulled out the chair which nestled under the small table. Sitting, I saw her note. It was written on the back of an envelope in fading blue ink, obviously with a pen which was failing. It wasn't really much of a note. At the top, Lisa had written "Buddy,", but below this salutation were only faint marks of the pen that were not letters, but just skew lines of anguish like the markings on father's dining-room table.

I took the paper, folded it neatly in half, and reached for a pack of matches which sat on the corner of the stove. I wanted the letter to be gone. I never destroyed in anger, but rather with a dispassionate focus.

Removing a single match, I lit it between the black strip of the book and the opposing cover, causing the combustion to erupt with a tiny burst of orange flame and a sharp popping noise. Holding the match in my right hand and the folded letter in my left, I lit the corner of the paper. The flame crept slowly down the edges of the paper, the blackened center consumed slowly by the orange glow. As the flame got close to my hand, I blew out the flame and left the ash on the table. Purposefully, I changed out of my clothes and crawled, alone, into the bed, the blue light of the Empire State Building again serving as sentinel outside of the window. "Mets win," I thought before drifting off.

As the first light of day broke through the window, the phone rang again. I darted out of the bed, grabbing the phone a little too aggressively and knocking the receiver onto the wooden floor. Picking it up, I shouted, "Who is this? Who are you?"

"Buddy, Buddy," the voice answered softly, "it's Tenerife."

At the sound of her voice, my heart slowed enough to allow my breathing to catch up; there was someone out there who knew me, knew where I was. "Tenerife, you got me... you found me out here. Hell of a trip, so far."

"It's about to get a lot weirder, Buddy. I need you to do a job for me, a huge one, but one you'll like. I don't want to ruin your vacation, all right? But can you leave there tomorrow or the day after?"

"Yeah." I wondered, foggily, what it was she wanted.

"Remember Dennis Smith? The guy in prison with TB, who was in with Tony Parsons? I sent you out to those nightclubs?"

"Right."

"He's escaped from prison." Tenerife paused for dramatic impact, and got the predictable gasp from me. "He talked his way out. Turned out that he got some fake ID and told the guards that he was the new visiting psychiatrist, that he had come in before the shift change, and didn't know the procedures. One of the guards walked him right out of the building, right out to his car. Actually, out to someone else's car, which he stole. So now he's gone."

Imagining the man walking out of the prison, I let out half of a laugh, which came out as a choked cough. "So you get your big prison case at last, Tenerife, and the plaintiff escapes. So what happens now? Is it all over?"

"That's why I need you, Buddy. We had a conference on it yesterday, and the Judge reluctantly agreed that the escape does not affect the fact that a constitutional violation might have occurred. We had some good cases, where the prisoners escaped because they wanted to avoid more abuse. There's two problems, though. First, I need to get answers to interrogatories, signed by him, by the start of next week, or the whole thing is over. I'll just make it seem like we got them before the break. The Judge is holding me to the discovery schedule so that..."

"Whoa, Tenerife, hold on a minute. What's an interrogatory? Why do you need these?"

Tenerife sighed. "Sorry, Buddy. I forget that you're not a lawyer. In a civil case, the two sides find out about one another and what happened through depositions, where you sit down and interview the other side's witnesses, and interrogatories, which are written questions to the people on the other side. If your guys don't show up for the deposition or answer the interrogatories in time, the Judge can end the case, especially if you are the plaintiff bringing the case, like we are here. So I need to get the interrogatories from him by next week or we lose. This judge is not going to give us a break; and I don't want him to cut us off."

"What's the second problem?"

"The second problem," Tenerife continued, "is that I can't have contact with him. If I do, it is a violation of the ethics code not to turn him in. So I'm stuck. That's why I need you to go find him."

The sleep dropped away from me as I heard the story. My thoughts swirled between the events of the night before and the challenge ahead of me; I had a thousand questions. Should I wait for Lisa? Would she come back? I couldn't let Tenerife know the story, however, so I returned to her project. "How do I find him?"

"We traced the phone number that he called here from yesterday. It was a pay phone in Beaufort, South Carolina. What's going to happen is that I'm going to Federal Express the interrogatories to you tomorrow, and then you're going to go find him. I have the address you're at now, so just be there tomorrow morning. I'll put in a check to cover your initial expenses as well and a letter explaining what to do. You up for this?"

I leaned back with the phone in my lap. "Damn straight I'm ready for this."

"Buddy, I feel bad about busting up your trip with Lisa. I tried to clear this with your Dad, but he's gone missing for the last two days. Seriously, no one knows where he is. Do you know what's going on?"

"First of all, things sort of got busted up with Lisa already."

There was a long pause at Tenerife's end. "That's your business, but I'm sorry. What about your Dad?"

"He said something about going away for awhile, so it doesn't surprise me. He said it was business. So what do I do about this? Just wait for the Federal Express tomorrow?"

"Do some research, Buddy. Find out where this Beaufort is, first of all, and then go over to the library and check it out. We've tried tracing Dennis Smith's file here, but it looks like we're going nowhere fast. I'll talk to you tomorrow."

I hung up the phone and slumped back onto the couch, my feet over the tiny coffee table. The phone conversation had taken the absence of Lisa from the forefront of my mind, but her leaving quickly took over my thoughts as I tried to focus on the new assignment. The two co-mingled in my still-groggy brain, the search for Lisa and the search for the elusive Dennis Smith, and I imagined, fleetingly, that the two of them were together.

In the afternoon I walked down to the library at Fifth and Forty-second, pushing my way into the main reading room through a troop of small children going the other way with their teacher. The children came up to my waist, and their shouts and loud whispers swept me into the room.

I had walked into the library without a game plan, and I sat down in the reading room for a brief reconnaissance. The great hall seemed noble, and the odor of the place, which was something related to the musty smell of a basement stocked with forgotten treasures, seemed to emanate directly from the bowed heads of the readers aligned on either side of the long wooden benches. Across from me was a man who had stacked on either side of him volumes on theology. Looking behind me, I realized that I had passed the card catalogue as I swept through the sea of children, and returned to the antechamber. Only two books were listed as dealing with Beaufort, and I requested both of them from the closed stacks. I waited in a tall wooden chair, clutching the slip bearing my number, 47, and watching the call board attentively until the 47 in the corner lit up, hailing me back to the desk.

Returning to my seat with both of the slim volumes, I opened the notebook I had purchased from a street vendor and began to take notes. Neither of the books took the reader beyond the 1920's, and each described the town and the surrounding sea islands fawningly, in nostalgic terms used by travel agents and television documentarians. One, however, contained a map of the area, which I photocopied. The islands were all blobs and strips and necks of land stretching towards one another like amoebas.

Most of the information in the books seemed mundane, and I lightly skimmed those portions dealing with the settlement of the islands. The brief section describing the social structure of the area, however, was striking. "Racial and economic relations," wrote the author, "remained stable and satisfactory until the time of the late unpleasantness, at which time the order of nature seemed to be reversed, and the future of the white man in this part of the world was imperiled. A discussion of such events here would only serve to confuse and dishearten the reader, and thus are avoided." The writer then launched into a protracted discussion of the town in the 1920's, thereby skipping all of the military and social history of the area during and immediately after the civil war. Avoidance of confronting hard topics was something I could relate to.

Unable to focus on the remainder of the books, I returned them and stepped out of the library with my notebook. Outside, the September sun streamed over the steps, and I sat down on the white stone. In front of me, people moved quickly on the sidewalk, hurrying home from work. New York was a very lonely place for those of us on the library steps, by choice or fate. Each was alone; some read books or newspapers, others ate food wrapped in paper or plastic, while still others sat silently watching the street or the sky. I felt very ready to leave New York.

I walked back to the apartment with my eyes on the pavement rather than the sky, like a true resident. As I approached the stoop, I saw a Federal Express deliverywoman standing there ringing a buzzer.

"That for me? Buddy Trigg? Or David Trigg?" I asked the young woman.

"David Baxten Trigg? Yeah, it's for you. You got any I.D.?"

I showed her my Illinois drivers license, took the envelope up to the apartment, and grabbed the phone. Tenerife's work number rang four times before she answered.

"Buddy, you get it yet? They said it would get there this evening," Tenerife said hurriedly.

"Yeah, it's all here," I said, opening the envelope and pouring out twelve pages of interrogatories, a short note from Tenerife, and $120 in cash. "Cash!"

"I sent cash," said Tenerife, "because it occurred to me that you could have problems trying to cash a check in New York. Trust me, I've tried. Now we have to decide how you're going to get down there."

"I thought I'd take a bus."

"You ever been to the Port Authority?"

"No," I said, "it sounds all right. Where's the port?"

Tenerife's laugh was a gentle murmur, a brook falling over rounded stones. "It's not all right, Buddy, it's a hellhole, but you'll be okay. Just watch yourself, and don't get there too long before your bus leaves. That, and don't walk down 42nd street."

"Too late, Tenerife, I already did that a couple times."

"You're a terror, Buddy. Now, once you get down to Beaufort, you'll have to find a place to stay on your own. Once you get there, I'll wire you some money."

"No problem, Tenerife. This has sure been one strange vacation."

There was a brief pause. "The judge sentenced those guys who killed Mark. Confinement until age twenty-one. They decided to plea out to Murder, but figured they would be sentenced as juveniles. They were right."

I had no energy to receive or process this news, so I shoved it away. I thanked Tenerife for her help, packed my single bag, and left the apartment, sliding the keys under the door as I left. Stepping onto the street, I felt cleansed by the movement; my first steps leaving the city gave me a rush of confidence that the events of the past hours could be left behind. The hint of fall in the air was no delusion; it was September 20, the last afternoon of summer, and a tree at the end of the block had burst into a brilliant yellow, sending a glow down the block. It was that single golden afternoon on which the leaves of a tree have uniformly changed color, but have not begun to fall from the tree. I walked under the golden arc, turned the corner, and hailed a cab to the Port Authority.

The Port Authority bus terminal was as bad as Tenerife had implied. The public area reeked of the persistent and unmistakable smell of urine, and the nooks and crannies were even worse. Around the corner from the ticket windows, an old man babbled incoherently and masturbated, while a small group of schoolgirl tourists stood nearby, watching through widened eyes and amid hushed whispers. A man with half of a hot dog offered to sell it to those in line. I refused his offer.

"Don't worry," said the man behind me in line, a graduate-student type with a pony-tail who had noticed my wide-eyed looks, "the terminal looks scary, but it makes the trip turn out like one of those free-style jazz concerts. You know, where there is all this incredible, discordant noise and then all of a sudden there is this beautiful melody that develops out of it and takes over, and all of a sudden there's music out of the chaos. That's what this is like. You take the bus out of the tunnel, cross the bridge out of the chaos, and slowly the beauty of wherever else you're going just takes over and seems all the more beautiful after a few hours in the Port Authority."

Impressed by the man's analysis, I nodded approvingly, asking, "So where are you from?"

"Oh," said the man, "I'm from here. I couldn't live anyplace else. I'd probably die."

"Hmmmm," I said, trying to sort it through. There was really nothing to say to this man.

I bought a ticket to Beaufort, which involved changing buses in Richmond, Columbia, and Charleston. Thirty-eight hours, including lay-overs, fifty-nine dollars. The Richmond bus left in thirty minutes at 10:30, level C.

To my surprise, the bus sitting at the gate to Richmond was marked "Donny's Specialty Tours", and featured a big picture of a smiling man with a bow tie. Looking at the picture closely, I noticed that the man looked slightly crazed, with the eyes diverging slightly and his mouth wavering between confident smile and psychotic leer. Approaching the door, I asked the driver if this was, in fact, the bus to Richmond.

"No, it's the bus to the North Pole," the man said in a bored, rehearsed voice. "Of course it's the bus to Richmond. Get on if you're going on."

I took a seat next to the window, near the middle of the bus. Shortly after I boarded, a middle-aged man with an orange vinyl coat took the seat next to me. He smelled of some off-brand of vodka, and turned lurchingly to me as soon as he had righted himself in his seat.

"Hey, I'm Michael."

I took the phlegmatic man's hand and introduced myself, realizing that I had aborted my New York trip without visiting my brother, as I had promised. The man's right hand was cold and damp, almost as if dew had formed on it.

"Nice to meet you, then, Buddy," said Michael, "have a nice whatever... Equinox." With that, he dropped off to sleep, his deep breathing punctuated by an occasional wheezy coughing spasm. He slept with his head slumped over onto his chest, his chin sticking to the vinyl windbreaker each time his head rose in a coughing fit. I watched the man for a few moments, concerned that he would slump over into my lap as the night wore on.

* * *

The bus exited the city through the Lincoln Tunnel, emerging into the swamps of Jersey with the tall buildings of the city far behind us, reduced to mere stacks of pinpoints of light in a cluster. In the swamps, there were reeds outlined by the lights on the tops of the petroleum tanks. There was a certain comforting feeling in the gentle sway and bounce of the bus as it jostled with the other traffic, and I looked out the window at the swamp grasses and oil refineries, trying not to think about Lisa. It was hard, however, as the gentle feeling of the movement of the bus reminded me of a vague feeling I often had waking up in the morning next to her.

The bus stopped first in Trenton, and the wheezing Michael made his exit, bidding me farewell. The bus was nearly full, and a beefy woman in her mid-thirties who seemed haggard but friendly took the vacant seat beside me.

"Oh, my word!" said the woman, "it's almost midnight. I am so tired of this. My name's Gladys and I work in a laundry and I'm not married. Tell me about you before I fall asleep. I love your hair. Like a skunk."

I reclined the seat slightly and looked out the window as I spoke. "My name is David Baxten Trigg II. The 'two' is because I'm named after my grandfather, not my dad. Not that I ever met my Grandfather; he died before I was born, like my other three grandparents and my most interesting Uncle. My Mom died when I was ten, and my best friend died this year. My girlfriend just left me because I don't want my kids to be Jewish. Well, she thinks I don't want them to be, I just don't know. I'm thirty years old, and I make nine dollars an hour, plus expenses, working for my father's company." I looked out into the dark.

"I saw an incredible tree today. It was a maple, with those yellow leaves that kids put between pages in their civics books. It changed the whole block, that yellow tree. No matter what else was happening, you had to look at it. It changed the light. I love that kind of tree, the kind that can change the light."

Gladys had fallen asleep, her head resting lightly on my upper arm, her legs tucked under the seat, and her right hand trustingly tucked into my elbow. I longed to trust anyone, anything, as much as this stranger trusted me.