"Well, I feel poor."
"That's a perception, not a fact."
"I also don't feel good about us, Bill, I don't feel good about you." Her voice was shrill, fearful. "Because I don't think that you can fix everything. I know how much you blame yourself. But it was a fucking accident! But you believe you have to suffer because of it! That's what's in your head. And I don't want to suffer with you! And I don't want Timmy to have to suffer! Why can't you just shake this off, why can't you just sort of pretend it didn't happen?"
Pretend that Wilson Doan Jr. hadn't died in our son's bedroom? I didn't have an answer. I could only watch Judith's gaze dart around the apartment- as if all we owned were burning before her- and then back at me, her expression furious, her beautiful eyes filled with resolve, even hatred. Yes, she hated me now, and wanted me to know it.
"You're not going to stick around and find out, is that it?"
"I don't think you under-"
"I understand that you're embarrassed by the fact that I'm not making any money right now. I understand that your sense of security has been assaulted-"
"Shattered- fucking shattered, Bill."
"And I understand, Judith, that you have withdrawn all spousal affections until such time as money has returned to your hot little hand."
"Oh, fuck you!"
"Well, that's my point. You won't."
"That's right, and why would I want to?"
"Because you used to like it."
"Yeah, well, I used to do a lot of things and now I do other things," she said, coldly. "And you might as well understand that."
Judith moved out less than a month later, after badgering me into letting her sell the apartment. Yes, she moved out- to San Francisco. We didn't know anyone there, so far as I knew. The giant yellow moving van came while I was out buying coffee, and the two of them left that evening, Timothy holding his empty baseball glove. No fight, no tears, even. As if it wasn't really happening. The real estate agent will be here in the morning, Judith said, everything is taken care of. All you have to do is leave. I nodded dumbly. You'll have to find yourself a place to live, Bill, okay? Her arms were folded in front of her. Lips rigid. Voice firm. You understand why this has to happen. I think she had Timothy on some kind of tranquilizers, because he didn't protest or cry, not at that point anyway, and when they were gone, when they had actually left me, forever and ever, I — well, I fell apart.
I know this is ugly, I know this is sad. If you see a minivan crash off the highway, engine smoking, windshield a bloody mess, rear wheels in the air, you slow down for a good look and then stomp on the gas to get the hell out of there. I do, too. After all, there are so many pleasant entertainments. The sitcoms and the cyberfrolic. It's all great. Go to it if you must. Flick and click and disappear. You won't get that here. This goes somewhere else. This is about waiting for the bounce.
For a time I rented a two-bedroom apartment in one of the anonymous new towers on the West Side of Manhattan, bright and clean and charmless, faced with pink granite- a bakery confection of an apartment building. The real estate agent, a man who carried three cell phones, sensed my aloneness and distraction and announced that the place was "a guaranteed babe magnet, let me tell you." But that didn't interest me so much as the fact that the building seemed far removed from my old circles. No one I knew would imagine that I'd moved to such a place. The apartment, which faced west toward New Jersey, as well as California, where Judith and Timothy now lived, was large enough that Timothy would have his own room, and I duplicated as many of his possessions as I could remember- clothes, shoes, video games, Yankees posters- keeping alive the dream that my boy might soon be sleeping in the bed or flipping through his baseball cards while listening on the radio to Derek Jeter foul off curveballs. But I quickly found that I was unable to step foot into the room, that doing so filled me with dread, as if Timothy himself had perished, the room merely a shrine to his memory.
A few months into my time there, one of the residents, a woman of about forty with bluish lipstick, frowned as I passed through the lobby. "Excuse me?" she called.
"Yes?" I said.
She stared at me, mouth set.
"Something wrong?" I said.
"I don't know," she answered. "I heard something."
"Heard something?"
"About you, yes."
"What did you hear?"
She looked at my feet and at the expanse of floor between us, then back at me. "I heard that you killed a child and got away with it. That there wasn't enough proof to send you to the electric chair." She waited for my response, her hands on her hips, alert to her own bravery. "There are a lot of kids in this building, mine included, so-"
"So you wanted to know."
"Yes. That's right. Someone knew someone who knew you. They didn't tell me the exact connection."
I said nothing.
"Well?" her voice came back, more righteous now.
I took a step toward her so as not to raise my voice.
"Stay there!"
I stopped. "There was a terrible accident," I said.
"That's not what I heard."
"That's what happened. Believe me, I was there."
"I don't believe you. I think there's more to it than that."
I resented this lipsticked woman, whose name I did not know, I hated her nosy instincts, her ferocious willingness to make accusations on the flimsiest of information. She was a dangerous kind of person, but she was also trying to protect her children and the children of other parents, and I doubted that I'd have acted much differently if the tables had been turned. "It was a terrible accident," I repeated. "That's all I can tell you. It destroyed two families."
"It just can not have been that simple."
I started to move on.
"Wait a minute! I think you're going to have to explain yourself to the tenants' association."
"Oh?" I remembered their fliers in the lobby, concerning trash removal and where children's bicycles could be stored. "And what if they don't find my explanation satisfactory?"
"Then I guess you'll have to leave."
"My lease is with the building owners, not with the tenants' association," I noted.
At this the woman gave a tight ratlike smile. She was happy that I'd resisted. It meant that now there was an issue, something to pull at, to get the flesh to tear. "We'll see," she threatened. "We will most definitely see."
A flier appeared on the bulletin board the next day announcing "a meeting of tenants concerned about family safety issues." Two days later, the minutes of that meeting were posted, announcing that "there was unanimous agreement that there is an urgent need to alert building management about issues relating to the character and criminal histories of specific tenants."
This was an inquisition and a witch-hunt and a vampire-chase, conducted in daylight by people who meant well, and it was coming to get me. I donated the entire contents of my apartment- toys, furniture, kitchen things- to the Catholic church ten blocks to the north and moved out.
Yes, I hurriedly moved out, and I also moved down, where I hoped no one would know me, to a small third-story walk-up on Thirty-sixth Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues in the garment district. It's a lousy area, one of the city's many pockets of dirty, congested nowhereness, a few blocks from the rump ends of Pennsylvania Station and Macy's. I rather liked its hulking, paint-peeling anonymity. You don't want to go there. It'd be a waste of energy- a neighborhood with no neighbors to speak of, just offset-printing shops squatting in looming ten-floor factories where long fluorescent tubes stay on all night and smoke vents elbow from opaque windows. A place where you can get an industrial sewing machine repaired in an hour, or a greasy breakfast for $1.50. Where tired men push racks of sequined blouses on rolling flat dollies or pile five dozen cellophaned office chairs on the street. At night, there's no interesting decadence, no glammy intrigue, just drifting, muttering shadows, many wandering to and from the Hotel Barbadour around the corner, one of the city's few remaining single-room residences. Sad, unsoaped people- tooth-pickers and flagellomaniacs. Hummers and have-nevers. My building, in the middle of the block, looked out on a parking garage where a tired woman in red pants gave blow jobs from inside her van to the clerks on their lunch hours. When they came out afterward into the sunlight, they paused to tug at their pants, look left and right, then went on. Sometimes the woman's children played outside the van while she was inside. Ninth Avenue provided a Laundromat, a deli, a newspaper shop, and a daily encounter with a big-armed Puerto Rican guy who appeared each morning, always with a White Castle coffee cup and often a black eye, singing off his drunk as he staggered in the sunlight. "I took on the Cubans," he'd cough, "I took on the Haitians. I'ma gonna kill everybody."