“Did your father give you permission?”
He stood and watched.
“What’s so interesting about the view from that room? You can tell me that, can’t you?”
She leaned against the door, prepared to remain for three, four, five days, in the context of parental body language, or until he answered.
He moved one hand away from his body, slightly, the hand without the pencil, palm up, and executed the faintest change in facial expression, causing an arched indentation between the chin and lower lip, like an old man’s mute version of the young boy’s opening remark, which was “What?”
He sat alongside the table, left forearm placed along the near edge, hand dangling from the adjoining edge, curled into a gentle fist. He raised the hand without lifting his forearm and kept it in the air for five seconds. He did this ten times.
It was their term, gentle fist, the rehab center’s term, used in the instruction sheet.
He found these sessions restorative, four times a day, the wrist extensions, the ulnar deviations. These were the true countermeasures to the damage he’d suffered in the tower, in the descending chaos. It was not the MRI and not the surgery that brought him closer to well-being. It was this modest home program, the counting of seconds, the counting of repetitions, the times of day he reserved for the exercises, the ice he applied following each set of exercises.
There were the dead and maimed. His injury was slight but it wasn’t the torn cartilage that was the subject of this effort. It was the chaos, the levitation of ceilings and floors, the voices choking in smoke. He sat in deep concentration, working on the hand shapes, the bend of the wrist toward the floor, the bend of the wrist toward the ceiling, the forearm flat on the table, the thumb-up configuration in certain setups, the use of the uninvolved hand to apply pressure to the involved hand. He washed his splint in warm soapy water. He did not adjust his splint without consulting the therapist. He read the instruction sheet. He curled the hand into a gentle fist.
Jack Glenn, her father, did not want to submit to the long course of senile dementia. He made a couple of phone calls from his cabin in northern New Hampshire and then used an old sporting rifle to kill himself. She did not know the details. She was twenty-two when this happened and did not ask the local police for details. What detail might there be that was not unbearable? But she had to wonder if it was the rifle she knew, the one he’d let her grip and aim, but not fire, the time she’d joined him in the woods, as a fourteen-year-old, in a halfhearted hunt for varmints. She was a city girl and not completely sure what a varmint was but clearly recalled something he’d said to her that day. He liked to talk about the anatomy of racecars, motorcycles, hunting rifles, how things work, and she liked to listen. It was a mark of the distance between them that she listened so eagerly, the perennial miles, the weeks and months.
He’d hefted the weapon and said to her, “The shorter the barrel, the stronger the muzzle blast.”
The force of that term, muzzle blast, carried through the years. The news of his death seemed to ride on the arc of those two words. They were awful words but she tried to tell herself he’d done a brave thing. It was way too soon. There was time before the disease took solid hold but Jack was always respectful of nature’s little fuckups and figured the deal was sealed. She wanted to believe that the rifle that killed him was the one he’d braced against her shoulder among the stands of tamarack and spruce in the plunging light of that northern day.
Martin embraced her in the doorway, gravely. He’d been somewhere in Europe when the attacks occurred and was on one of the first transatlantic flights as schedules resumed, erratically.
“Nothing seems exaggerated anymore. Nothing amazes me,” he said.
Her mother was in the bedroom dressing for the day, finally, at noon, and Martin walked around the room looking at things, stepping among Justin’s toys, noting changes in the placement of objects.
“Somewhere in Europe. This is how I think of you.”
“Except when I’m here,” he said.
The standing hand, a small bronze normally on the bamboo end table, was now on the wrought-iron table, laden with books, near the window, and the Nevelson wall piece had been replaced by the photograph of Rimbaud.
“But even when you’re here, I think of you coming from a distant city on your way to another distant city and neither place has shape or form.”
“This is me, I am shapeless,” he said.
They talked about events. They talked about the things everyone was talking about. He followed her to the kitchen, where she poured him a beer. She poured and talked.
“People read poems. People I know, they read poetry to ease the shock and pain, give them a kind of space, something beautiful in language,” she said, “to bring comfort or composure. I don’t read poems. I read newspapers. I put my head in the pages and get angry and crazy.”
“There’s another approach, which is to study the matter. Stand apart and think about the elements,” he said. “Coldly, clearly if you’re able to. Do not let it tear you down. See it, measure it.”
“Measure it,” she said.
“There’s the event, there’s the individual. Measure it. Let it teach you something. See it. Make yourself equal to it.”
Martin Ridnour was an art dealer, a collector, an investor perhaps. She wasn’t sure what he did exactly or how he did it but suspected that he bought art and then flipped it, quickly, for large profit. She liked him. He spoke with an accent and had an apartment here and an office in Basel. He spent time in Berlin. He did or did not have a wife in Paris.
They were back in the living room, he with the glass in one hand, bottle in the other.
“Probably I don’t know what I’m talking about,” he said. “You talk, I will drink.”
Martin was overweight but did not appear ripe with good living. He was usually jet-lagged, more or less unwashed, in a well-worn suit, trying to resemble an old poet in exile, her mother said. He was not quite bald, with a shadow of gray bristle on his head and a beard that looked about two weeks old, mostly gray and never groomed.
“I called Nina when I got in this morning. We’re going away for a week or two.”
“Good idea.”
“Handsome old house in Connecticut, by the shore.”
“You arrange things.”
“This is something I do, yes.”
“I have a question, unrelated. You can ignore it,” she said. “A question from nowhere.”
She looked at him, standing behind the armchair across the room, draining his glass.
“Do the two of you have sex? It’s none of my business. But can you have sex? I mean considering the knee replacement. She’s not doing the exercises.”
He took the bottle and glass toward the kitchen, responding over his shoulder with some amusement.
“She doesn’t have sex with her knee. We bypass the knee. The knee is damn tender. But we work around it.”
She waited for him to return.
“None of my business. But she seems to be entering a kind of withdrawal. And I just wondered.”
“And you,” he said. “And Keith. He’s back with you now. This is true?”
“Could leave tomorrow. Nobody knows.”
“But he’s staying in your flat.”
“It’s early. I don’t know what will happen. We sleep together, yes, if that’s what you’re asking. But only technically.”
He showed quizzical interest.
“Share a bed. Innocently,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I like this. How many nights?”
“He spent the first night in the hospital for observation. Since then, whatever it is. This is Monday. Six days, five nights.”
“I will be asking for progress reports,” he said.
He’d talked to Keith a couple of times only. This was an American, not a New Yorker, not one of the Manhattan elect, a group maintained by controlled propagation. He tried to gain a sense of the younger man’s feelings about politics and religion, the voice and manner of the heartland. All he learned was that Keith had once owned a pit bull. This, at least, seemed to mean something, a dog that was all skull and jaws, an American breed, developed originally to fight and kill.