Chapter 16D

It was very early Thursday morning and a woman on the airplane who sat next to me and looked like my mother was smiling at me and asking, "You're going back?" I smiled at her politely and said "Yes." She said, "Oh, you'll love it in Memphis," and I smiled politely and shook my head and said, "No, New York." She said "But we're going to Memphis." I said "No. New York." I rested my head against the padded headrest. I closed my eyes, and it was just as it was when I was on the plane to New York, weeks before when I left Memphis. I opened my eyes and looked past the lady, who was also looking out the window, and through the window I saw the airplane wing that I'd looked at all the way from Memphis to New York. I realized that the lady sitting beside me was not the lady who sat beside me when I left Memphis for New York. I said to myself I thought I was sitting beside the window when I got on this plane to New York. How did that passenger who looked like my mother switch seats with me? Suddenly a voice in my head said This airplane is going to Memphis and I said No New York and the voice said Not New York, Everyone in New York is Gone. And quickly I looked for a piece of paper in my pocket, a small slip of paper like one of those white half sheets of paper that come with stationery, the piece of paper with something Martha had written on it, and the paper was gone. My mouth dropped open as a terror went through me, and I realized I could never get the piece of paper back.

When I opened my eyes I was sitting up in Martha's bed. Martha slept beside me, unmoving. I was not panting or trembling, but I felt creepy. There was a loud rush of blood in my brain. My heart was not beating fast; but my pulse in my chest was like a hard thud.

I lay back. But after a few minutes I knew I wouldn't fall asleep again. I got out of bed and saw the clock on Martha's night table as I walked from the room. 2:48 a.m. I took a cold glass bottle of milk from the refrigerator and drank from it, and held the bottle against my forehead. I stood in the archway between the kitchen and the dining and living room. I looked at the calendar on the wall behind the dining table.

Seventeen days remaining.

I crept into the bedroom and lay down again for several minutes, still unable to sleep. Cautiously I dug my workout clothes from the chest in Martha's bedroom. Martha never stirred. I went into the living room to dress, then I went downstairs and stood on the front steps of the building. The streets were lifeless.

Walking down the block to Second Avenue, I looked around. What had been so new was now familiar, unsurprising, fully assimilated into my feeling and thinking: the smell of concrete and iron, of asphalt and gasoline, and the odd odor like old peanuts. A single taxi cruised toward me on Second Avenue at a few miles per hour, thumping over potholes, lumbering past me and heading downtown, wobbling as it crossed the path of the trolley tracks the city no longer used. Looking beyond the taxi I saw the Empire State building far downtown, forty blocks away, looking like a massive ghost in the hazy night. What I had been told about New York sleeping only between three and four in the morning was apparently true; the city seemed deserted. I wanted to start a run but thought better of it, having heard too many stories about midnight muggings on empty streets. I saw an all-night deli open near 86th Street and walked there and bought a pack of cigarettes and a coffee. Then I went back to Martha's apartment.

Now I wished I'd borrowed one of Ronnie's astrology books. I wanted answers. Answers. What I did find was my copy of the previous Sunday's Times. I retrieved it from the shelf under the coffee table and began paging through it randomly by the light of a small table lamp. I kept thinking: Memphis Martha Ronnie Memphis Martha Ronnie Memphis Memphis Memphis.

I turned on Martha's radio at very low volume and sat on the floor with my head near the speaker. An announcer was introducing the subject of a discussion program. The Defense Department discovered signs of testing by the Soviet Union on the R7 Semiorka rocket, suspected to be undergoing flight tests in Kazachstan. It would be the first successful nuclear ICBM, able to bomb targets anywhere in the United States. The Eisenhower administration reported that the massive multi-stage rocket could be capable of launching the first space satellites, and might even be capable of traveling to the moon before the United States could develop similar craft.

Wonderful news. Nuclear holocaust. Life was being shortened at every turn. Governments spent trillions learning to blow continents to pieces. But no one was spending a dime to keep me from Memphis.

At a quarter to five, Martha appeared in the living room doorway. "You're up?" she mumbled, her eyes not quite open.

I said, "Go back to bed." I got up and led her by the shoulders into the bed, where she plopped down on her face. I kissed her and she smiled and blew me a smooch and snuggled into her pillow. I waited for her to settle, my face next to hers. My nose imbibed the sugar and nut fragrance of her hair, and the nighttime sweat of her that smelled of earth and plants and herbs instead of sour sweat. And I wished I could hold her tight without waking her.

Within a few moments traffic began to stir outside, doors slammed, cars started, trucks pounded along the streets. All of Manhattan seemed to wake up at once.

I went outside again, where the sky quickly grew light but overcast. I jogged into the gray, into the dull thick green of summer in Central Park. The August humidity mounted quickly, and the mist along the clearings in the park seemed more like thin steam. When my breathing faltered I slowed to a walk until it returned, then I took up the jog again. I stayed on the main roads, the reservoir and other areas seeming too deserted. Then I ran all the way back to Martha's, and I felt it was still not good enough. The anxious pressure in my chest was still there.

Martha was sitting at her dressing table, almost fully dressed and putting on makeup. I hurried in and bent down and kissed her.

She pulled my arm. "Hey, you're out of breath. You've been running forever."

"Yeah. I have to fix your coffee."

"C'mere. Kiss me first."

I gave her a smooch on the lips and she pulled me down for a hug. "Don't," I said, but it was too late. I dripped sweat on her blouse.

She said, "Oops, you're all sweaty. Isn't it too hot for all that exercise?"

"No," I said. I stripped to my shorts and went to the kitchen and plugged in the percolator. While the coffee was brewing I took a shower in the kitchen stall. As I stepped out and dried with a towel, Martha was stirring her coffee in the dining room and taking a sip.

She said, "Damn, I have such a headache."

"Don't you ever take time off?"

"I took a day for the beach, remember? And I get the second half of next week off."

"Yeah, but what if you're sick?"

She quickly swallowed, leaning on the table to step into her high heels. "Being in the shop isn't sick, Steven." She had one shoe on, and she picked up the coffee cup and upended it, gulping the rest. She got her foot into the second shoe, saying, "That coffee is so good." She walked to her briefcase near the front door in the living room. Picking up her briefcase, she asked, "What were you doing up so early?"

"I couldn't sleep."

"Is something wrong?"

I walked to her, saying, "Well, I'll tell you what was wrong." I secured the towel around my waist and said, "I was waiting to give you a kiss on your way to work." I held her shoulders and kissed her on the cheek.

She smiled, but she was obviously skeptical. "I wish I knew what was up with you." She opened the door and said on the way out, "Don't forget, we have dinner with Howard and his friends tonight."

"Yes." The door closed. Yes, I thought, Howard and his friends. I walked into the kitchen, re-tightening the towel around my waist. I poured a coffee and doctored it and sat at the dining room table. The long night was starting to get to me. Most of the details of my dream were fading. I recalled looking for a piece of paper from Martha. What could that symbolize? I recalled no such note from her, ever.

A few minutes later there was a soft knock on the front door. I walked to the door, tightening the towel around me again, and asked, "Ronnie?"

"Yes."

I opened the door, and stood aside. I asked, "Coffee? Milk? Sugar? Half 'n Half?"

"No." She entered wordlessly, her hair and the edges of her bathrobe fluffing in the breeze as she passed and headed for the bathroom. "'Scuse me."

I said, "Aspirin? Q-tips? Cotton balls?"

She muttered, looking inside the small cabinet under the bathroom sink, "None of the above. Oh, god. Where does Martha keep 'em? Why do people insist on keeping things where they belong?"

"What are you looking for?"

"I told you. None of the above. Oh. Thank god, here they are." She closed the door to the undersink cabinet and stood up, holding something packaged in blue paper. "What a day to end up in the shop."

I shook my head in wonder as Ronnie came into the living room. "That's what you call it? In the shop?"

"Sure. That's what my mother called it." Ronnie stood in front of me. "Why?"

"That's what Martha calls it."

"Yeah. She got that from me. She's too embarrassed to use words like 'menstruation.' It's too hard to say anyway. It's a guy word. I know it is. It's an ugly, stupid word. It's like 'testicles'. I bet the same guy thought up both words." She sniffed. "Coffee."

"You want coffee?"

She looked at me through the tangle of black hair over her eyes, then at the sanitary pad in her hand, then she put the pad in her robe pocket. "Sorry. Yes. That smells so good."

I walked into the kitchen and got a cup from the cabinet. I said, "What do you want in it?"

"Half n' half and a sugar. And excuse me, let me go to Martha's bathroom."

She went into the bathroom. When she returned a couple of minutes later, I had her coffee waiting on the dining room table.

She stood by the table and lifted the coffee, tasting it and brushing hair from her face. She closed her eyes. "Oh, god. Why doesn't mine taste like this?"

"I don't know. What do you use to measure the coffee and water?"

She took another sip and swallowed. "Measure?"

"That's why," I said. I stood up, clasping the towel around my waist. "I better get my clothes on."

"No, no. No need for that," she said as I went into the living room. "I'm leaving anyway." She took the cup with her and headed for the front door. "I'll bring the cup back, but I have to get to work. But listen..." She looked at me. "Is this what Martha wakes up to every morning?"

"Well, more or less. Usually less."

"Okay, listen..." She took another sip. "Gimme about four or five days, okay? Early next week, or before you leave New York. Wake up in the morning, looking just like that, with the towel, just like that. And come down to my place --" She grinned and blushed, her hand on the doorknob.

I said, "Yeah, right."

"Before you leave New York? Bet Martha won't mind. Really."

"Right. Before I leave New York."

She mumbled, opening the door. "He doesn't think I'm serious." She went into the hall, peering at me through the crack in the door. "God, if I weren't in the shop right now..." She closed the door.

I might have been amused. But I kept hearing Ronnie's words, "Before you leave New York." I locked the door behind Ronnie and went into the bedroom and lay down. I tried to get some sleep before my appointment with Fiore. I'd doze for ten minutes at a time and then wake up again. Damn that coffee.

Finally I set Martha's alarm clock for a one-hour nap ending at nine fifteen a.m., which would get me to Fiore's on time. I finally drifted off, hearing "Before you leave New York Before you leave New York."

Instead of taking a taxi or subway the forty blocks to Fiore's, I jogged and walked. I was still posing a few days a week and earning extra money. But it wasn't enough for what I wanted to do in seventeen days. I arrived at Fiore's a few minutes early and found him in his office. I asked him if I could get into a class with heavier workouts.

He said, "More? You want more?" He chuckled, looking me over with that manic grin. "Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday? Or Monday, Wednesday, Friday?"

"Tuesday, Thursday, Sat --"

"Good! Then do this. No coffee, no tea, eat a big breakfast two hours before class! You can do this?"

"No coffee?"

"Coffee, poison! Tea, poison!"

"Okay, okay."

Fiore walked around me, checking me out again, his hands on his hips. "This class uses weights. But you are not to perform the squats. Listen to me! No squats! You are overdeveloping your upper legs!"

"All right."

"See my friend Julio. The class begins at ten! You will not be able to walk home today, my friend."

Fiore was very nearly correct. The class worked around calisthenics with weights, most of which I couldn't handle yet. By the time it was over I was a sweating, heaving heap on the floor of the gym. The instructor, a brawny, good looking, slick-haired Hispanic guy in his twenties, stood looking down at me.

He asked, concerned, "Hey. You sure you can handle this class?"

I panted, "I have to."

"Don't work so hard, then. If a weight's too heavy for you, use something lighter until you build up. Use just enough weight to allow you to perform the movement perfectly. Trying too hard with too much weight will not build mass. Go lighter, if you have to."

Use something lighter, he said. The words gnawed at me as I painfully made my way back to Martha's. It seemed I was forever behind everyone else. Perhaps a fitful sleep affected my performance. I took a brief nap at Martha's and got dressed to meet Ronnie for lunch.

At lunch Ronnie said across our table, "What happened to you? You look like you have a hangover or something."