What’s that called?
Frank gives up.
With Sally Peake hovering in the background, he sits at the table and starts asking questions.
Claudio and Alex, it seems, are taking some of the same literature courses (Melville, Dos Passos, Coover) and that’s how they know each other. Claudio says Alex is a really nice guy who doesn’t drink or do drugs. He’s very smart, very shy, very independent minded, but he also has a naive streak in him a mile wide. Thinks he can change the world. He has an older brother he’s in thrall to, Julian, who was at Atherton a couple of years back and is a veteran anti-globalization protester. Julian is apparently a streets guy. With Alex, it tends to be more cerebral. On hearing all of this, Frank finds himself simultaneously relieved and a little concerned.
He then asks Claudio about Alex and Lizzie.
It turns out the pair have been an item for several months now, and are rarely seen apart.
Or in the company of others.
“It’s a very exclusive relationship,” Claudio says, “and not just romantically. They tend to rely on each other in all sorts of… function-specific situations.” He reaches for his coffee cup, lifts it, then puts it down again. “But it’s an arrangement that seems to work pretty well,” he adds, “given that neither of them has a lot going on in the old social skills department.”
Frank bristles at this, even though he knows it’s true, at least in relation to Lizzie.
He leans back in his chair, unsure of what to think.
This Claudio seems fairly smart himself, and confident-though maybe a little too eager to showcase the Psych 101 stuff. Still, there’s no reason not to believe what he’s saying about Alex.
But where does that leave matters?
Deflating slightly, Frank glances around.
The Globe Café? The Juice Depot? This is so not like the food court at Winterbrook Mall. There are no obese people here, for starters. Everyone he can see is young and healthy. Look at Sally Peake, for instance-over there, pacing up and down, on her phone-the very picture of long-limbed, pink-cheeked, genetically unmodified youth.
Frank bends his neck slightly to get a look at the spine of Claudio’s book.
And no one at the mall is reading Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, that’s for sure.
After a moment, he catches Claudio’s eye and says, “Do you have any idea where they are?”
“No, Mr. Bishop, I don’t. Alex wouldn’t tell me, but he did mention they’d be gone for a week, and that means-what day is this? Thursday?-they’ll probably be back tomorrow.” He shrugs his shoulders, as if to say, Hey, problem solved. Frank then half expects this nineteen-year-old to produce a small pad and a pen and to write him out a prescription for some Xanax.
But who’s to say, maybe the problem is solved.
He pictures his precious girl, his Lizzie-little bit mousy, little bit mouthy-off somewhere with her shy, brainy, idealistic boyfriend, the two of them, what… going at it like jackrabbits?
Is that it? Is that all?
Does Deb know, and didn’t want to tell him? Didn’t want to point out that it’s actually none of his business?
With what it’s costing him, Frank could get worked up about Lizzie cutting school for a week, but… that’s not going to happen.
Academically, she’s doing fine.
He wants her to be happy, too, though. And if she is, well and good, who’s he to interfere?
You’re only young once.
He stares into space for a while. When he refocuses, he realizes that both Sally Peake and Claudio Mazza are staring at him.
Walking along the High Line, toward the exit at Thirtieth Street, Lizzie feels sick to her stomach. She also feels sort of hollowed-out, and paralyzed.
Not to mention scared.
She wonders if, when she gets back to street level, she shouldn’t just keep heading toward midtown. Because then she could stop by the law firm where her mother works. She could submit herself to that, and all it would entail-the machinery of the law, the machinery of her mother’s disapproval.
She doesn’t know which machinery would be worse.
Although they’re both pretty much unthinkable, really.
Like every other option she’s come up with in the last three hours. Which is how long she has been out and about in the city, wandering aimlessly, having hot flashes, hallucinating (as good as), and dry crying.
When she saw it-the clip, the footage from outside the Herald Rygate-fuck, it was like getting whacked on the head with a baseball bat. Because at first she had to piece the story together, the references and images, which were all rapid-fire, all seemingly random and out of sequence, it wasn’t breaking news anymore, but an aggregate, a mosaic, an accumulated and already absorbed narrative.
Jesus, listen to her, she sounds like fucking Julian.
But now she understands. That’s the difference. Now she gets it. And she’s been going over it all, the past week, reassembling it in her head, reinterpreting every word spoken, every testy exchange, every weird glance and inexplicable mood swing. Now she understands why Julian was so unhappy about her tagging along-the politically illiterate pain-in-the-ass girlfriend that his brother couldn’t bear to be separated from even for a lousy few days.
How could she have been so stupid?
Actually, she knows how. Because go over the signs, go over the timeline, and it all fits… even if it doesn’t make any sense, even if it doesn’t connect on an emotional or a gut level, even if it’s literally unbelievable-the idea that Julian could plan and carry out an operation of this magnitude. But go over the footage, study those two familiar, spectral figures, the way they move, the body language, and suddenly it all makes perfect sense.
To her at least.
But don’t ask her to explain it.
She walks down the steps of the cutoff to Thirtieth Street and keeps going. She crosses Tenth Avenue and heads for Ninth.
She’s wearing jeans and a sweater, but there’s a chill in the air, and it’s probably going to get chillier. Also, her feet are sore. She left the apartment in a hurry, not giving any thought to what she was doing, certainly not to what shoes she should wear.
She brought her phone, but the damn thing needs to be charged.
She has maybe twelve dollars and some loose change in her pocket. She’s hungry, but won’t go in anywhere because the thought of having to deal with people makes her feel even more nauseous than she’s already feeling.
At Sixth Avenue, she turns left and heads uptown.
So far she has covered most of downtown, the East Village, SoHo, Tribeca, and the West Village. Then she made her way up to Gansevoort Street, where the High Line starts.
There’s a lot to process in what has happened, no question about that, and she’s in a daze, but there’s also something nagging at her, tugging at her, some other level of this that she’s resisting.
What is it?
Block after block passes, and her mind refuses to settle. When she gets to Forty-second Street, she wanders into Bryant Park, finds an unoccupied bench, and sits down.
There’s a simple, recurring question here: How could she not have seen what was going on? Was she blind? Lizzie’s understanding of the situation up to now has been that Julian is the radical in the Coady family. He’s involved with various protest groups and firmly believes in direct action-city marches, shutting down bridges and ports, so-called black bloc rampages, that kind of thing. He also believes, at some level, in the use of actual physical force. She hasn’t given much thought to this, but if she does, what comes to mind? Pushing, shoving, shouting stuff like “Fuck the cops.” Maybe throwing stones or broken bottles. All of which leads, of course-according to Alex-to police brutality, tear gas, pepper sprays, Tasers, stun grenades. And beyond that to mass arrests, trumped-up charges, surveillance, infiltration, raids. And then, inevitably, on to more cycles of resistance.