Quality Time
Where he stopped for the red light on busy Sheridan Road, Wales watched a woman fall down in the snow. A sudden loss of footing on the slick, walked-over hummock the plows had left at the crosswalk. Must be old, Wales thought, though it was dark and he couldn’t see her face, only her fall— backwards. She wore a long gray man’s coat and boots and a knitted cap pulled down. Or else, of course, she was drinking, he supposed, watching her through his salted windshield as he waited. She could be younger, too. Younger and drinking.
Wales was driving to The Drake to spend the night with a woman named Jena, a married woman whose husband had done colossally well in real estate. Jena had taken a suite in The Drake for a week — to paint. She was forty. She had her husband’s permission. They — she and Wales — had done this five nights in a row now. He wanted it to go on.
Wales had worked abroad for fourteen years, writing for various outlets — in Barcelona, Stockholm, Berlin. Always in English. He’d lately realized he’d been away too long, had lost touch with things American. But a friend from years ago, a reporter he’d known in London, had called and said, come back, come home, come to Chicago, teach a seminar on exactly what it’s like to be James Wales. Just two days a week, for a couple of months, then back to Berlin. “The Literature of the Actual,” his friend who’d become a professor had said, and laughed. It was funny. Like Hegel was funny. None of the students took it too seriously.
The woman who’d fallen — old, young, drunk, sober, he wasn’t sure — had gotten to her feet now, and for some reason had put one hand on top of her head, as if the wind was blowing. Traffic rushed in front of her up Sheridan Road, accumulating speed behind headlights. Tall sixties apartment blocks — a long file of them, all with nice views — separated the street from the lake. It was early March. Wintry.
The stoplight stayed red for Wales’s lane, though the oncoming cars began turning in front of him in quick procession onto Ardmore Avenue. But the woman who’d fallen and had her hand on her head took this moment to step out into the thoroughfare. And for some lucky reason the driver in the nearest lane, the lane by the curb, slowed and came to a stop for her. Though the woman never saw this, never sensed she had, by taking two, perhaps three unwise steps, put herself in danger. Who knows what’s buzzing in that head, Wales thought, watching. A moment ago she was lying in the snow. A moment before that everything had been fine.
The cars opposite continued turning hurriedly onto Ardmore Avenue. And it was the cars in this lane — the middle turning lane — whose drivers did not see the woman as she stepped uncertainly, farther into the street. Though it seemed she did see them, because she extended the same hand that had been touching her head and held it palm outward, as if she expected the turning cars to stop as she stepped into their lane. And it was one of these cars, a dark van, resembling a small spaceship (and, Wales thought, moving too fast, much faster than reasonable under the conditions), one of these speeding cars that hit the woman flush-on, bore directly into her side like a boat ramming her, never thinking of brakes, and in so doing knocked her not up into the air or under the wheels or onto its non-existent hood, but sloughed her to the side and onto the road — changed her in an instant from an old, young, possibly drunk, possibly sober woman in a gray man’s coat, into a collection of assorted remnants on a frozen pavement.
Dead, Wales thought — not five feet from where he and his lane now began to pass smartly by, the light having gone green and horns having commenced behind. In his side mirror he saw the woman’s motionless body in the road (he was already a half block beyond the scene). The street was congested both ways, more car horns were blaring. He saw that the van, its taillights brilliant red, had stopped, a figure was rushing back into the road, arms waving crazily. People were hurrying from the bus stop, from the apartment buildings. Traffic was coming to a halt on that side.
He’d thought to stop, but stopping wouldn’t have helped, Wales thought, looking again into the mirror from a half block farther on. A collection of shadowy people stood out on the pavement, peering down. He couldn’t see the woman. Though no one was kneeling to assist her — which was a sure sign. His heart began rocketing. Cold sweat rose on his neck in the warm car. He was suddenly jittery. It’s always bad to die when you don’t want to. That had been the motto of a man named Peter Swayzee he’d known in Spain — a photographer, a silly man who was dead now, shot to pieces covering a skirmish in East Africa, someplace where the journalists expected to be protected. He himself had never done that— covered a war or a skirmish or a border flare-up or a firefight. He had no wish for that. It was reckless. He preferred the parts that weren’t war. Culture. And he was now in Chicago.
Turning south onto the Outer Drive along the lake, Wales began to go over what seemed remarkable about the death he’d just witnessed. Some way he felt now seemed to need resolving, unburdening. It was always important to tabulate one’s responses.
The first thing: that she was dead; how certain he had been about that; how nothing less seemed thinkable. It wasn’t a moral issue. Other people were helping in the event she wasn’t dead. In any case, he’d helped people before — once, in the UBahn, when the Kurds had set off plastique at rush hour. No one in the station could see for the smoke, and he’d guided people out, led them by the hand up into the sunny street.
The other thing, of course — and perhaps this was a moral issue: he was moved by the woman as he’d first seen her, falling into the snow, almost gently, then standing and righting herself, getting her hand set properly onto the top of her head. Putting things right again. She’d been completely in her life then, in the fullest grip and perplex of it. And then— as he’d watched — three steps, possibly four, and that was all over. In his mind he broke it down: first, as though nothing that happened had been inevitable. And then as if it all was inevitable, a steady unfolding. In his line of work, no one had a use for this kind of inquiry. In his line of work, the actual was all.
The lake was on the left, dark as petroleum and invisible beyond the blazing lanes of northbound, homeward traffic. Friday night. Out ahead, the city center lit the low clouds shrouding the great buildings, the tallest tops of which had disappeared, igniting the sky from within. The actual jitters, he found, hadn’t lasted so long. Though what was left was simply a disordered feeling — familiar enough — as if something had needed to be established by declaring someone he didn’t even know to be dead, but it hadn’t been. Of course, it could just be anticipation.
The Drake was jammed with people at six p.m. — even in the lower arcade, where there were expensive shops and an imitation Cape Cod restaurant he and Jena had dined in their first night, when they’d been so pleased with themselves to be together. Wales entered this way each night — the back entrance — and exited this way each morning. If Jena’s husband employed a detective to watch for him, then a detective, he decided, would watch the front. He was not very good at deception, he knew. Deception was very American.