Maybe halfway down crumpled and forsaken Gansevoort, a distinguished couple emerged from a small saloon. Possibly they’d visited the son they were supporting at the bar where he worked part-time. Holding hands, they walked toward the lone working streetlamp, underneath which, it was apparent, the front headlights of their Cadillac had been destroyed, its bumper half-hanging. The aged man stomped his right foot in place. His wife looked at him in horror, said his name out loud. As if on cue, a police car approached, slowed, cruised onward.
Oliver didn’t know where he was going, had no specific purpose. Maybe he’d head for the comfy nooks and cramped sidewalks of the West Village, lose himself gazing through the windows of tasteful boutiques where doctors purchased brocaded knickknacks for mistresses.
But if he was to survive this next half hour, he had to get away from the stench. The frozen death.
He smelled the smoky aroma of roasting peanuts from across the street. He could see the vendor scoping the teenybopper bridge-and-tunnel girls coming out of the PATH station, passing the minutes until he could push his cart toward its nightly storage facility.
On the side of a bus stop a poster showed a black woman adorned in a headdress, dashiki, and multicolored earth-tone pattern, looking so stereotypically African it almost hurt the soul. She offered relief, 900-737-3225, the Psychic Friends Network, $3.89 a minute.
Muscled young men in T-shirts from a corporate basketball league were tossing a basketball and quoting hip-hop lyrics. Coming from the opposite direction, an elderly woman wrapped her basset hound’s shit in a plastic bag.
Oliver let himself be distracted by all this: classical white American southern Protestants and preening goths and carefully put together burnouts, all of them without any awareness other than their own concerns. A particularly civilized and gorgeous and sophisticated couple caught his eye. They sauntered at a leisurely pace, motioned toward one another with their hands, made warmly funny comments. Their subject? Where to go for dinner.
Oliver marveled. Like he was witnessing the invention of fire.
—
He was heading back home when he noticed two women exiting a discount wig shop. Minuscule skirts and long legs, shapely in fishnets, made them impossible to ignore. One woman was pulling at the other’s plastic bag. The second was slapping back, laughing, telling her not to play.
“What you looking at? Oh, it’s sweet hubby.” A smack of gum. “Hey there, sweet hubby.”
The second one joined in. “Yo, sugar.” Her Adam’s apple throbbed.
“Oh,” said Oliver. “Oh.”
“Don’t act like you ain’t know.”
“Hey, Donette—” Oliver said. “Michelle.”
“Yeah, I know you seen this good stuff, baby.” Extending the gum from her mouth, the first teased out a long slick line, sucked it back in. “How that lovely wife of yours holding up?”
What could he say? What was there to say?
There was this to say
“I love you more than life.”
Oliver watched her compose herself: cap off, sunglasses off. Bare head. Her eyebrows gone so that the ridge of her forehead was apparent, patches of dried skin patterned like small scallops at her nearest temple. She was wincing, etched grooves at the corners of her eyes, gunky and glistening, lashes fluttering.
Still she focused across the room, finding the camera.
“Your birth was without a doubt the greatest thing I’ve experienced,” she continued. “I’m so grateful I had support: my doula, Oliver, all my friends. They allowed me to go without any pain meds. I’m so grateful. I was lucky enough to receive the gift of feeling you exit my body. That sound and feeling, lump, thump, bump.” She laughed. “I thought it would go on forever. There was so much baby. So much of you.”
Her hand rose, long fingers caressing her cheek. Alice’s voice was winsome. “Seeing your face for the first time, that was the single best moment of my life. Finding out you were a girl…I fell so deeply in love….I couldn’t sleep that night, after you were born….I just kept marveling at you, holding you.”
It seemed she might cry. Instead she said, “I am so blessed to have had that experience.”
Her concentration broke, and she emerged from what might have been a trance, bald head gradually rising. Looking reedish and mystic, she spent a moment taking in the chaos around her on the bed: note cards scattered atop the throw quilt’s ragged panels, a small brass statue — some kind of mutant elephant — knocked on its side. Directly in front of the covered lumps that had to be her legs, a yellow pad with bullet points was propped on a throw pillow.
“I had an order to what I wanted to say,” she thought out loud. “But I don’t think, what feels organic—”
“You’re doing fine,” Sparrow replied, without looking up from the viewfinder, the video camera mounted on a tripod.
Alice covered her eyes with a cupped hand, checked with Tilda.
“What you said was beautiful.” Her voice came from behind the light source. “Go on, honey.”
She understood, looked at nothing, inward perhaps — opening a drawer in her mental desk, peering at its contents. Eyelids lowered, stayed shut. Now a thin smile widened her lips, chapped and blistered.
“When you are asleep, my Doe dear, I watch how trusting you are. I just bask in your breathing, that face I love more than life, that face that is life to me, it’s…it…” Alice sniffed, crinkled her nose. Lids opened onto black diamonds, wet and sparkling. “It means so much to me.” She directed her attention toward the camera now.
“Since falling ill, I have kissed you so many times. I have always known that the moment would come when I can’t kiss you anymore. If I look for too long it becomes impossible to appreciate the sight of you. I can’t enjoy the moment. But, my dear sweet girl, please know what I am saying. The pain of your face is not your face, just the fact I have to be away from it.”
From the doorwell, not meant for the world’s ears: “Jesus.”
Oliver, exhausted and shabby, arms folded across his chest. His eyes were soft and open, his cheeks still ruddy from the cold air. He felt at once stunned, touched, and horrified.
“You weren’t supposed to see.”
Her eyes red — more hashish? Crying?
“Isn’t giving up, isn’t this the opposite of what we should be doing?”
“I thought this might be the right time.”
“Believe me, it’s not like I’m in love with that hospital. But lots of smart people are devoting their lives to fighting this horrible shit and helping you get better—”
“I can’t eat. I can barely see. We don’t have a donor. What should I be doing?”
The bedroom blinds had been raised, presumably to give them light while filming, but night had taken over, spreading shadows through the room’s edges. Out of the window the elevated railroad tracks were blackened husks.
A new voice interrupted: “She’s not giving up.”
Sparrow had uprighted herself, was placing herself between Oliver and his wife. “I’ve been meaning to tell you,” she told Alice, “I asked about Siddhartha leaving his wife to become Buddha.”
“Right, your treatments,” Oliver said. “You have a history of amazing results. That’s what I’ve heard?”