“Do you want dessert?”
“No.”
Stand apart. See things clinically, unemotionally. This is what Martin had told her. Measure the elements. Work the elements together. Learn something from the event. Make yourself equal to it.
Carol wanted to talk about Keith, hear about Keith. She wanted the man’s story, their story, back together, moment by moment. The blouse she was wearing belonged to another body type, another skin color, a knockoff of a Persian or Moroccan robe. Lianne noticed this. She had nothing interesting to tell this woman about Keith because nothing interesting had happened that was not too intimate for telling.
“Do you want coffee?”
“I hit a woman in the face the other day.”
“What for?”
“What do you hit people for?”
“Wait. You hit a woman?”
“They make you mad. That’s what for.”
Carol was looking at her.
“Do you want coffee?”
“No.”
“You have your husband back. Your son has a father full-time.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“Show some happiness, some relief, something. Show something.”
“It’s only beginning. Don’t you know that?”
“You have him back.”
“You don’t know anything,” she said.
The waiter stood nearby, waiting for someone to ask for the check.
“All right, look. If something happens,” Carol said. “Like the editor can’t deal with the material. The editor can’t work fast enough. She feels this book is destroying the life she has carefully built over the last twenty-seven years. I’ll call you.”
“Call me,” Lianne said. “Otherwise don’t call me.”
After that day, when she could not remember where she lived, Rosellen S. did not come back to the group.
The members wanted to write about her and Lianne watched them at work, folded over their legal pads. Now and then a head would lift, someone staring into a memory or a word. All the words for what is inevitable seemed to crowd the room and she found herself thinking of the old passport photos on the wall of her mother’s apartment, from Martin’s collection, faces looking out of a sepia distance, lost in time.
The agent’s circular stamp at the corner of a photo.
The bearer’s status and port of embarkation.
Royaume de Bulgarie.
Embassy of the Hashemite Kingdom.
Türkiye Cumhuriyeti.
She’d begun to see the people before her, Omar, Carmen and the others, in the same isolated setting, with the signature of the bearer sometimes written across the photo itself, a woman in a cloche, a younger woman who looked Jewish, Staatsange-hörigkeit, her face and eyes showing deeper meaning than an ocean crossing alone might account for, and the woman’s face that’s almost lost in shadow, the printed word Napoli curled around the border of a circular stamp.
Pictures snapped anonymously, images rendered by machine. There was something in the premeditation of these photographs, the bureaucratic intent, the straightforward poses that brought her paradoxically into the lives of the subjects. Maybe what she saw was human ordeal set against the rigor of the state. She saw people fleeing, there to here, with darkest hardship pressing the edges of the frame. Thumbprints, emblems with tilted crosses, man with handlebar mustache, girl in braids. She thought she was probably inventing a context. She didn’t know anything about the people in the photographs. She only knew the photographs. This is where she found innocence and vulnerability, in the nature of old passports, in the deep texture of the past itself, people on long journeys, people now dead. Such beauty in faded lives, she thought, in images, words, languages, signatures, stamped advisories.
Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese.
Dati e connotati del Titolare.
Les Pays Etrangers.
She watches the members write about Rosellen S. A head lifts, then drops, and they sit and write. She knows they are not looking out of a tinted mist, as the passport bearers are, but receding into one. Another head comes up and then another and she tries not to catch the eye of either individual. Soon they would all look up. For the first time since the sessions began, she is afraid to hear what they will say when they read from the ruled sheets.
He stood near the front of the large room watching them work out. They were in their twenties and thirties, arrayed in ranks on the stair climbers and elliptical trainers. He walked along the near aisle, feeling a bond with these men and women, not sure quite why. They strained against weighted metal sleds and rode stationary bikes. There were rowing machines and spidery isotonic devices. He paused at the entrance to the weight room and saw powerlifters fixed between safety bars, grunting up out of their squats. He saw women at the speed bags nearby, throwing hooks and jabs, and others doing footwork drills, skipping rope, one leg tucked up, arms crossed.
An escort was with him, young man in white, on the staff of the fitness center. Keith stood at the rear of the great open space, people everywhere in motion, blood pumping. They quick-walked on the treadmills or ran in place, never seeming regimented, never rigidly linked. It was a scene charged with purpose and a kind of elemental sex, rooted sex, women arched and bent, all elbows and knees, neck veins jutting. But there was something else as well. These were the people he knew, if he knew anyone. Here, together, these were the ones he could stand with in the days after. Maybe that’s what he was feeling, a spirit, a kinship of trust.
He walked down the far aisle, escort trailing, waiting for Keith to ask a question. He was looking the place over. He would need to do serious gymwork once he started his job, days away now. It was no good spending eight hours at the office, ten hours, then going straight home. He would need to burn things off, test his body, direct himself inward, working on his strength, stamina, agility, sanity. He would need an offsetting discipline, a form of controlled behavior, voluntary, that kept him from shambling into the house hating everybody.
Her mother was asleep again. Lianne wanted to go home but knew she couldn’t. It was only five minutes ago that Martin had walked out the door, abruptly, and she didn’t want Nina to wake up alone. She went to the kitchen and found some fruit and cheese. She stood at the sink washing a pear and heard something in the living room. She turned off the faucet and listened and then went into the room. Her mother was talking to her.
“I have dreams when I’m not quite asleep, not all the way down, and I’m dreaming.”
“We need to have some lunch, both of us.”
“I almost feel I can open my eyes and see what I’m dreaming. Makes no sense, does it? The dream is not so much in my mind as all around me.”
“It’s the pain medication. You’re taking too much, for no reason.”
“The physical therapy causes pain.”
“You’re not doing the physical therapy.”
“This must mean I’m not taking the medication.”
“That’s not funny. One of those drugs you take is habit-forming. At least one.”
“Where’s my grandson?”
“Exactly where he was last time you asked. But that’s not the question. The question is Martin.”
“It’s hard to imagine that a day will come anytime soon when we stop arguing about this.”
“He was very intense.”
“You haven’t seen him when he’s intense. It’s a lingering thing, goes back years, well before we knew each other.”