Why I Don't Write Read online

  I’ve been right here. You just woke up.

  Are we at home?

  Yes, he said. We’re at the house.

  You came from—? she whispered. She shook her head. No, she said. That’s not…

  Is there anything I can get you, dear?

  No, John.

  Here, have a little water. He held up a paper cup. His hand was shaky. He managed to guide the bent straw to her lips.

  Thank you, John, she said. Saying his name pleased her. She smiled, though her husband would have hardly called it a smile. Her face had lost most of its flesh and her profile was more pronounced, even regal.

  She spoke with great effort. I’m thinking of the dancing, she said. Isn’t it lovely to think of? Her eyelids were low and her black eyes looked elsewhere.

  It is, he said. He stroked her hand. Her hand had not changed so much, though her wedding band was loose beneath her knuckle. But her wrist was different, flat like a board, and her forearm where it emerged from her dressing gown was like a plank.

  Have you changed the music, John?

  What, dear?

  I’m sorry, she said. I’m confused.

  Painkillers, he said. The medicine is making you confused.

  Her gaze flicked in his direction with a sharp bird-look, testing the soundness of this. The medicine, she said uncertainly, and nodded. What time is it?

  He consulted his watch and after some time reported, Twenty to five.

  In the evening, she said with suspicion.

  In the evening.

  They sat for a while.

  Then she said, Tomorrow I think we might go to the shore.

  We’ll see.

  She lifted up her narrow arms and dropped them on the bedspread. Oh, God, she groaned, I’d love to swim. In lovely cold water.

  You would like that, he said.

  I wanted to swim with you, John. She frowned. But they served dinner so early.

  It’s all right, he said.

  They kept the tables apart, but everyone danced after, she said. I thought—but then she came the next day. Her mouth turned down. What did you say to her, John?

  The man shook his head.

  What? she said.

  I can’t remember, the man said with resignation.

  She was prettier than I. That, everyone knew.

  I don’t know about that, he said.

  Couldn’t dance as well though. But she was chic. I remember she had a really good-looking scarf and a wonderful suit. Better clothes than mine.

  The woman’s hand waved slowly; it didn’t matter so much now.

  You were a wonderful dancer, he said. You are.

  Did you love her, John?

  No, he said. I loved you.

  The woman nodded, her expression placid, skin stretched over her cheekbones.

  I know, she said, meaning to reassure him. I know. Her eyes closed, winglike. I wondered if you believed in Christ, she said.

  Her husband watched her fall asleep. In their lifetime he’d watched her face go through many changes, but he could still see the first face he’d known when she walked up from the beach that day.

  Where are we again? Her eyes stayed closed.

  Home, in the house on Chestnut Street.

  Oh yes. In my room.

  In your room.

  That’s right. Her eyes opened. You’ll stay here, John? You won’t go away?

  I won’t go away.

  He sat and watched her sleep, looking at her dry lips and polished forehead. Past the bed out the window, it was turning blue and he looked at his watch. The doctor was coming by after five. He stayed in the chair. He looked at his thumbs meeting each other.

  After an uncertain amount of time there was a tap on the door. The doctor’s head appeared, the door was pushed farther ajar. Sleeping? the doctor said.

  The man nodded.

  Could I talk to you? the doctor said, with a twitch of his head.

  They stood side by side at the upstairs railing, both looking down at the top of the lamp on the hall table below. I want to ask, said the doctor, how you are holding up.

  The man stared ahead of him, not wanting to speak.

  Andrew, said the doctor. It can be hard on a man.

  At the mention of his name, Andrew turned to face the doctor. Yes, he said. He knew.

  • OCCUPIED •

  Riding back from her studio, Ivy thought, I’ll stop for just a minute.

  Already they had been here a month and she’d not gone. The sitter had to leave at five-thirty, there was supper to make, but it was pathetic she’d not checked out what was being broadcast all over the world. At an earlier time in her life she would likely have been sitting there herself—righteous, smoking cigarettes, stubborn.

  She located a parking sign, propped her bike wheel with her boot, and wound the chain around the signpost. She fiddled with the padlock key till the shackle clicked in.

  She stood. Wind barreled down the surrounding skyscrapers. They seemed to tilt in over the small patch of park with its rows of small trees and pig-colored polished marble descending in slabs. Across the street a low canopy of orange trees fluttered over a bank of lumpy sleeping bags and blankets looking like compressed trash, draped with a blue plastic tarp. The park set in this square looked crisp and new, smaller than she’d pictured, and less ramshackle.

  Hair blew across her face. She felt for her hair elastic, but it had fallen out. That was annoying. She always kept her hair tied back. She stuffed the loose strands into her jacket collar and crossed the street to walk down the perimeter. The images she’d seen in the paper and on the screen were decidedly more monumental than what appeared before her. But wasn’t it always like that? In front of you, things turned smaller, and seemingly less substantial than in a photograph, despite the fact that the real thing was actually more substantial, being three-dimensional and more complex. In front of you it was actually real. And what was more compelling than real? Images of real, apparently. To a visual artist like Ivy, this was hardly a new revelation.

  She strode down the tilting concrete, as usual alone. For some time now when she was walking, it was either alone, or with her son. It was one or the other. Walking with Nicky she was continually amazed at the unquestioning faith of the little fellow, holding her hand and wholly accepting that this was where he was meant to be, beside her. He was eight, so one would think she’d have grown accustomed to it by now.

  Plywood barricades rose up at the end of the block, hiding the perpetual crater of construction. Rebuilding was still going on after, what was it now, ten years? One couldn’t visit the neighborhood without thinking of that day. If you’d been in New York, you had your story. Hers: out in the morning exercising, the crisp sunlight, a blue September sky smooth as church glass, and the strangest sight of the high pale tower with a plume of white smoke furling out of a black hole torn at the top. How could an airplane have been that out of control? And then the mounting awareness, as fire trucks sirened southward and shopkeepers stood with crossed arms outside their doors, that this was not an accident. Then someone at a bus stop—everyone stood staring—saying a plane had hit the Pentagon, and on the strangely trafficless Lafayette Street, dark figures hurried away from the mayhem. Men in dark suits with briefcases and women in skirts walked rapidly uptown, manic, stiff kneed. When they passed by, she saw their backs, from their heads down to their legs was powdered white. Later, drifting to Washington Square she stood among milling people facing down West Broadway to one of the towers now engulfed in white smoke. Strangers muttered to one another, astonished, How many people did the building hold? How many floors were—? when, in an instant, the tower in front of them dropped like a soufflé, vanishing before their eyes. A moan rose from the crowd. People stood frozen, then turned, they looked away, they looked back, t
hey didn’t move.

  The park sidewalk where she walked now was empty, the uninteresting outside of the encampment. Across the street along the base of skyscrapers, busy working people scurried up and down the hill, entering mammoth entryways, carrying briefcases, their shopping bags twisting in the October wind.

  The vision had been very like a hallucination. You could not believe what you were seeing. That was the phrase everyone kept using, they couldn’t believe what they had seen. Her brain immediately registered the otherworldliness of the seconds. The image entered and she was aware in that instant that it would never leave her. Out of the thousands of images which the city gathered and posted and printed and beamed after that morning, none she saw had been from the precise place where she stood watching, as her knees buckled, dropping as the building dropped. That was one time when what was in front of her was greater in intensity than what she saw depicted after. Not like the park in front of her now, more puny than its pictures.

  On that Tuesday morning, she felt that as a witness, she was a kind of custodian of the deaths. It sounded self-aggrandizing, so she never admitted the feeling, but she had taken it inside her, the obligation. But, really, what kind of custodian could one be of such a thing and what could one do with it?

  The sun was no longer visible, having dropped behind the buildings, though the sky would be light for another hour. She wondered now, as she paced down the sidewalk slope, how many people had actually witnessed it, the murder of thousands of people, and how many others kept that vision inside them and felt, as she did, to be a guardian of it.

  * * *

  •

  It looked like a statue, then she saw it was a man, dressed in a black cloak with a Darth Vader helmet, standing unmoving on a pink-and-beige polished marble platform. Around his neck a sign: I AM ONE OF THE 99%.

  She continued along the outside as if unsure how much she was ready to engage. The wind funneling down the buildings hit the sidewalk and crashed like a waterfall, spinning all the thin yellow and orange leaves in its turbulence.

  If he were here, she thought, he’d be here.

  She felt a small triumph that she had not thought of him for—how long was it? Well, a little while at least. But now the thought of him was back, for her to ruminate over. Was he even in town? She couldn’t be sure. He was more likely away, usually being somewhere else, never staying in touch, at least not with her. It had been three weeks since…Jesus, she thought, that person must be freezing.

  She’d reached the bottom of the park where, in an open half shell area, a shirtless man was dancing, his hands miming a giant braid. A drum beat dully; a tambourine bumped a hip, and two women twirled with meaningful smiles. They held ribbons swirling, a sort of May Day dance crossed with a rumba. A sign propped on the nearby wall read: MAKE MUSIC NOT MONEY.

  The movement had been both criticized and praised for its lack of definition. No leader, no clear agenda, yet it managed to convey a strong forthright expression of dissatisfaction if not fury with economic inequality in the country.

  She swerved away from the circling arms of a woman in a pom-pom vest and entered the park. Between the planted areas where trees shook, along marble borders, the paths were choked with boxes and bundles, tied down like ship cargo. Plastic tarps were everywhere, some spread out, some curled like wrapping paper, some sloppily folded. It had been rainy the last few days and they must have had to cover up a lot to keep things dry. She skirted a canvas lean-to and inside saw a girl with dreadlocks, her arms looped around a bearded dog with a red bandanna. Beside them a young man wearing a bumpy oatmeal fleece and shorts above pink knees was crouched over, sewing what looked like a pouch.

  Yellow police tape draped over box shrubs. She walked by an unshaven gray-haired man in a lumberjack coat sitting on a wire crate and stirring—was it soup?—in a small pot over a blue-flamed Bunsen burner. He gazed through her passing figure, as if admiring a distant valley. He could have been anywhere.

  She studied the faces as she moved by. Here were the people who had managed to suspend their lives so that they could express their disapproval of the unjust ways of the world. In the faces, she saw the purposeful expression of people convinced of their reason for being here, and of their importance. The look said, I have a cause, I have conviction, I am entertaining no doubts.

  A plump woman with a pink sweater falling off a creamy shoulder had a slightly startled expression—or maybe it was the high arch in her penciled eyebrows—as if ready for action, accustomed to being disturbed, and prepared for it. Her eyes darted around looking for someone. Two young men sat side by side on a tilted blanket. One had a baseball cap worn low to shield his eyes; the other was selecting chewing tobacco from a pouch and tucking it into his lower lip.

  She nearly knocked over a hand-painted poster wedged between plastic bags: THE PEOPLE STAND WITH MOTHER EARTH AND NOW IT IS “SPRING” ALL OVER THE WORLD. Represented, too, were the stubborn (THIS IS SO NOT OVER), the worried (WHAT WOULD JESUS SAY?), and the wounded: a sideburned man in a battered parka had his sign: FIRED FOR NOT BEING RICH ENOUGH.

  Off the path, among cloudy plastic containers with blurry contents inside, a young woman sat perched on a stool, being interviewed, her dark hair somehow solid and shaking, her skin spotted with blemishes. A man who did not look American—crisp shirt, stylish coat, arranged red scarf, the facial structure of a greyhound—held a microphone near her dark purple mouth, while his cameraman in a Greek captain’s hat shouldered a camera inches from her face. Ivy heard the soft voice—“People just don’t want to see that”—before a gust blew her words off and away.

  A fellow in black retro glasses was typing on a computer which rested on a large cardboard box—from a washing machine?—decorated all over with black Xs and one large O, presumably for “Occupy,” with a smiley face inside. A sign nearby said ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. That, she thought, admiring its wide net, could be applied to everything.

  * * *

  •

  In her brain there was always a someone. For years it had been Nicky’s dad. Since their split—more than two years ago—the place where he’d been was a ripped hole. She felt her son standing beside the black hole, baffled. She did her best to distract him, as if vigilance and concern could keep him from noticing that his father was no longer there.

  (This vigilance took all her energy and attention.)

  Then in had crashed Dexter Fleming. He intended in no way to make a crash, he had just appeared, interested. As far as he was concerned she was just another girl who, when he gestured with his hand to come a little closer to him on the couch, sidled obediently over to his firm round shoulder where the surprise of him being close turned out to be so massive Ivy could barely breathe. He had no intention of making the impression he did; he had no intention at all.

  Enough is enough with Dexter Fleming? No, not yet. She’d not had enough. At one point she would. She could see that. There was no way it would not end, but it was not yet. She had not had enough of him yet.

  She wove through the maze of bundles and plastic bags, the occasional chair, child sized, a fluttering line of Tibetan prayer flags. But he would probably have been here already, filing a report with his particular angle. People wanted to hear from Dexter Fleming, the photographer who’d been kidnapped in Iraq and escaped after three years. That he was handsome was no doubt a part of his fame, that he escaped by having a woman fall in love with him was another. It was easy to picture him here, weaving among the protesters, small potatoes compared to what he’d seen, sitting on their bundles. She thought of his perspective and tried it on. It felt like a higher, more relevant one than hers. What would he have made of it here?

  * * *

  •

  Wait, what did she make of it? The movement seemed slightly disorganized and vague but at least they were trying, she thought. At least they were showing they cared.

  * * *r />
  •

  What had she done all day? Hovered over a piece of paper, like a hawk searching the shallows far below for the shadow of a fish…and yet the people just sitting here…what was it that they were doing?

  When people were united in a cause it showed on their faces. The expressions on people in a protest march were always impressive: purposeful, unapologetic, convinced. The people here however had the air of tourists on vacation, or of travelers waiting for a bus. She was catching them in a lull, but they seemed ironically unengaged—none looked up as she walked by, only inches away. They smoked cigarettes, picked at pieces of sandwiches in tinfoil. One girl lay sleeping with her mouth open, unguarded and trusting. Her presence was her offering.

  A blast of wind funneled down from above, spilling leaves like confetti. Her hair scribbled over her face, blinding her. Tucking it back into her canvas collar, she flashed on his fist gripping the rope of her hair. Thank goodness people couldn’t see the lurid visions in one’s head. She replayed the vision, savoring the depraved thrill.

  Then, as if to balance herself, she thought of Nicky, who must stay always in her sights, possibly at the moment now playing on the thick living room rug, having disassembled his igloo of toys, intent on a train, or a tractor. When she played with him, he wanted her to push the ambulance and also make the sound and also describe again the person she was rescuing…No, you said that he broke his arm, Mama, do that part again, you forgot the person coming out of the store, you forgot the dog, etc. The scenarios had to be repeated exactly. She was a robotic performer. She, the same person whose brain went white with light as her pants were peeled off, pushed against the wall inside the man’s door, still in her winter coat…

  She saw an area of tinfoil-covered containers, presumably where people were fed cafeteria-style. Much had been written about the fluid mode of organization. People had managed to band together. Again she wondered what the man would think of it, then again stopped herself, aware now that fathoming the man’s thoughts led her swiftly down a cul-de-sac to his indifference, obtuseness, and lack of love. She pictured instead the man’s room where he’d first kissed her, first took her to bed. In the day it was white with black accents; in the night it was black with white and in both rooms there was allure and radiance.