It was a cross. She saw it as a cross and it made her feel, right or wrong, that there was an element of forgiveness in the picture, that the two men and the woman, terrorists, and Ulrike before them, terrorist, were not beyond forgiveness.
But she didn’t point out the cross to the man standing next to her. That was not what she wanted, a discussion on the subject. She didn’t think she was imagining a cross, seeing a cross in some free strokes of paint, but she didn’t want to hear someone raise elementary doubts.
They went to a snack bar and sat on stools arranged along a narrow counter that measured the length of the front window. She watched the crowds on Seventh Avenue, half the world rushing by, and barely tasted what she ate.
“I missed the first-day pop,” he said, “where the stock soars like mythically, four hundred percent in a couple of hours. I got there for the aftermarket, which turned out to be weak, then weaker.”
When the stools were all occupied, people stood and ate. She wanted to go home and check her phone messages.
“I make appointments now. I shave, I smile. My life is living hell,” he said, blandly, chewing as he spoke.
He took up space, a tall broad man with a looseness about him, something offhand and shambling. Someone reached past her to snag a napkin from the dispenser. She had no idea what she was doing here, talking to this man.
He said, “No color. No meaning.”
“What they did had meaning. It was wrong but it wasn’t blind and empty. I think the painter’s searching for this. And how did it end the way it did? I think he’s asking this. Everybody dead.”
“How else could it end? Tell the truth,” he said. “You teach art to handicapped children.”
She didn’t know whether this was interesting or cruel but saw herself in the window wearing a grudging smile.
“I don’t teach art.”
“This is fast food that I’m trying to eat slow. I don’t have an appointment until three-thirty. Eat slow. And tell me what you teach.”
“I don’t teach.”
She didn’t tell him that she was also out of work. She’d grown tired of describing her job, administrative, with an educational publisher, so why make the effort, she thought, now that the job and the company no longer existed.
“Problem is, it’s against my nature to eat slow. I have to remind myself. But even then I can’t make the adjustment.”
But that wasn’t the reason. She didn’t tell him that she was out of work because it would give them a situation in common. She didn’t want that, an inflection of mutual sympathy, a comradeship. Let the tone stay scattered.
She drank her apple juice and looked at the crowds moving past, at faces that seemed completely knowable for half a second or so, then were forgotten forever in far less time than that.
He said, “We should have gone to a real restaurant. It’s hard to talk here. You’re not comfortable.”
“No, this is fine. I’m kind of in a rush right now.”
He seemed to consider this and then reject it, undiscouraged. She thought of going to the washroom and then thought no. She thought of the dead man’s shirt, Andreas Baader’s shirt, dirtier or more bloody in one picture than in the other.
“And you have a three o’clock,” she said.
“Three-thirty. But that’s a long way off. That’s another world, where I fix my tie and walk in and tell them who I am.” He paused a moment, then looked at her. “You’re supposed to say, ‘Who are you?’”
She saw herself smile. But she said nothing. She thought that maybe Ulrike’s rope burn wasn’t a burn but the rope itself, if it was a rope and not a wire or a belt or something else.
He said, “That’s your line. ‘Who are you?’ I set you up beautifully and you totally miss your cue.”
They’d finished eating but their paper cups were not empty yet. They talked about rents and leases, parts of town. She didn’t want to tell him where she lived. She lived just three blocks away, in a faded brick building whose limitations and malfunctions she’d come to understand as the texture of her life, to be distinguished from a normal day’s complaints.
Then she told him. They were talking about places to run and bike, and he told her where he lived and what his jogging route was, and she said that her bike had been stolen from the basement of her building, and when he asked her where she lived she told him, more or less nonchalantly, and he drank his diet soda and looked out the window, or into it, perhaps, at their faint reflections paired on the glass.
When she came out of the bathroom, he was standing at the kitchen window as if waiting for a view to materialize. There was nothing out there but dusty masonry and glass, the rear of the industrial loft building on the next street.
It was a studio apartment, with the kitchen only partly walled off and the bed in a corner of the room, smallish, without posts or headboard, covered in a bright Berber robe, the only object in the room of some slight distinction.
She knew she had to offer him a drink. She felt awkward, unskilled at this, at unexpected guests. Where to sit, what to say, these were matters to consider. She didn’t mention the gin she kept in the freezer.
“You’ve lived here, what?”
“Just under four months. I’ve been a nomad,” she said. “Sublets, staying with friends, always short-term. Ever since the marriage failed.”
“The marriage.”
He said this in a modified version of the baritone rumble he’d used earlier for “the state.”
“I’ve never been married. Believe that?” he said. “Most of my friends my age. All of them really. Married, children, divorced, children. You want kids someday?”
“When is someday? Yes, I think so.”
“I think of kids. It makes me feel selfish, to be so wary of having a family. Never mind do I have a job or not. I’ll have a job soon, a good one. That’s not it. I’m in awe of raising, basically, someone so tiny and soft.”
They drank seltzer with wedges of lemon, seated diagonally at the low wooden table, the coffee table where she ate her meals. The conversation surprised her a little. It was not difficult, even in the pauses. The pauses were unembarrassed and he seemed honest in his remarks.
His cell phone rang. He dug it out of his body and spoke briefly, then sat with the thing in his hand, looking thoughtful.
“I should remember to turn it off. But I think, If I turn it off, what will I miss? Something so incredible.”
“The call that changes everything.”
“Something so incredible. The total life-altering call. That’s why I respect my cell phone.”
She wanted to look at the clock.
“That wasn’t your interview just now, was it? Canceled?”
He said it wasn’t and she sneaked a look at the clock on the wall. She wondered whether she wanted him to miss his interview. That couldn’t be what she wanted.
“Maybe you’re like me,” he said. “You have to find yourself on the verge of something happening before you can begin to prepare for it. That’s when you get serious.”
“Are we talking about fatherhood?”
“Actually, I canceled the interview myself. When you were in there,” he said, nodding toward the bathroom.
She felt an odd panic. He finished his seltzer, tipping his head back until an ice cube slid into his mouth. They sat awhile, letting the ice melt. Then he looked directly at her, fingering one of the dangled ends of his necktie.
“Tell me what you want.”
She sat there.
“Because I sense you’re not ready and I don’t want to do something too soon. But, you know, we’re here.”
She didn’t look at him.
“I’m not one of those controlling men. I don’t need to control anyone. Tell me what you want.”