And Now You Can Go (2 page)

Susan opens the door and there are seven policemen, two in plain clothes, holding badges.

"It's for you," she says, before they say anything. I wonder if this is how it will be from now on: whenever there are policemen at the door we'll assume they're for me.

They want me to come with them and I say I don't want to, that I have a class on Stuart Davis at four o'clock. They tell me I better come with them or else the same guy might do the same thing to someone else.

"You have to come," they say—all of them seem to say it— and I realize I have no choice. I give a description of the man with the Armani glasses and they don't find the description of the glasses as important as I do. They want his height and weight and age and hair color and skin color and a description of what he was wearing. I take guesses: five foot ten, one eighty-five, twenty-eight to thirty-five, reddish hair, Caucasian, black leather jacket.

I want to tell them what the leather of that jacket smells like when it's so close to you and how, maybe I was imagining it, but when he was running away, it's really quite possible he started humming that old camp song. The one about the cow knocking over a lantern and starting a fire, the hot-time-in-the-old-town-tonight song. But I fear they'll think I've lost my mind and they won't believe the rest.

I get into the backseat of an old Ford; the two undercover detectives sit up front. Slumping down, I keep my eyes right above the windowsill, the rest of my face hidden by the door. We drive by spots where policemen are holding men who fit the description I have given— they're wearing leather jackets and have reddish hair. I'm supposed to tell the detectives whether it's him or not. I don't need to look carefully because from far away I know they're not the man from the park. I recognize some of the men; I've seen them on the subway, in a restaurant. Even so, I'm certain that from this point on when I'm walking down the street and see them, my heart will leap.

The detectives take me to a police station and I tell another officer what happened and he takes notes and then I go home. I call my mother at work in San Francisco. I haven't called my mother at work since I was ten. I have to dial Information to get the number.

I tell the receptionist at the hospital it's an emergency, and my mother, a surgical nurse, is called out of the operating room. My mother assists on all forms of surgeries, and I think about the patient she's left behind so that she can talk to me. The woman on the operating table—I can only picture the patient as female—has had her appendix removed, or her breasts reduced, or her knee ligaments replaced. Whatever she's in for, she's my twin. I've started to see myself like this now: one woman with twins all over. If it hadn't been me in the park, then it would have been someone else. The reason I have to give a report is so it won't happen to another woman. Everything is for someone else, for some other woman, somewhere.

It's good to talk to my mother.

"I don't know what to do with myself now," I say. I'm thinking that it's not even two o'clock yet where she is and I'm wishing that I was there, with her, in a place where it's not yet two.

"Is there someone at school you can talk to?" asks my mother. She's Italian and strong and she believes therapy is for fragile Americans. I think it's strange that my mother is suggesting this, and I think she's right. Before she hangs up she says "I love you." It's the first time she's said it in years.

My father calls me minutes later.

"Darling?" he says. His voice is shaky like it was when his mother died and the way it gets when he hears songs he loves sung perfectly. It's very nice to have him on the phone and I just want to stay on the line like that except that after a while there is nothing else to talk about. He says he'll call later to see how I am. I'm relieved to have something to look forward to.

At the counseling center, I meet with a therapist who has short hair and eyes that look small behind the big frames of her glasses. She uses the index finger of her right hand to push her glasses up above the bridge of her nose. I talk and talk and tell her all the details the police didn't want to hear—how his expression didn't change when I mentioned paintings, only when I mentioned poetry, how he wasn't wearing gloves even though it was cold, that he wore no wedding ring.

"Oh my God, oh my God," she says.

She's doing everything wrong. She shouldn't be reacting the way she is. She should be strong.

As I'm putting on my coat, the therapist pushes her glasses up on her nose. "So, where exactly did the incident take place?"

"Why?" I ask. "I was just—" "What?" "Wondering."

"Why?" I say. "So nothing like that will happen to you?"

"Listen," she says. "You have every right to be angry, after what's happened to you." "Who said I don't?"

She offers to walk me home. It's six o'clock.

"No," I say, "it's okay." I don't want to have to be walked from place to place from now on. She makes an appointment for me to see her the next day and I tell her I'll come, but already I'm thinking I can call and cancel in the morning, after I've slept, after I've gotten over it all. She asks again if she can walk me home and I say no and leave by myself.

On my way home I run into a guy I know from working in the oral history department. I was supposed to catalog all these people's stories, their
histories
, as recorded on tapes, but after five weeks they all sounded the same, so I quit. He's a short, wide man with bulbous hiking legs and a wandering eye, his right.

"Hi," he says. I'm always surprised by how softly he speaks for such a squat man. He likes talking about animals, especially coyotes. He saw a coyote last summer, he's told me in one of the maybe five conversations we've had without other people. He had a lot of admiration for the coyote. If you come across a mountain lion you're supposed to maintain eye contact, he told me, but if you come across a coyote you're supposed to avoid it. As he said this, I tried not to stare at his wandering eye.

"Hi," I say. We're standing in the middle of a sidewalk, next to a man sitting on a beach chair, wearing headphones and selling old magazines:
Esquires
and
Playboys
and
Gourmets
.

"What's wrong?"

He asks me so softly, looks at me so gently with his stable eye, that I tell him what's happened. I'm not even sure if I want to be telling him, if I want to be telling anyone.

"Oh my gosh," he whispers.

The man with the headphones and magazines begins singing out loud. "Where you going now?" the coyote man asks.

"Home."

"No, no, you shouldn't be alone. This is awful," he says. "Come back to my place, it's a few blocks away. We'll call some of the others and they'll come over too."

The idea of calling others, the idea that there are others, makes me feel better.

We get back to his apartment, which has a futon couch and books about lightning.

We talk about lightning, and about a woman he met who was struck by it. "Twice," he says. "She's the most amazing person."

I like it that it happened twice and she's still alive. I can identify with this woman and her lightning. I can identify with the coyote lover and his wandering eye. I have joined the world of people dealt unexpected blows.

He offers me tea, coffee, diet soda. Am I imagining that he's looking at my stomach? "Water," I say.

There's a picture of a coyote framed on his wall. It reminds me of the posters of animals my friends and I hung on our bedroom walls when we were young. The posters were usually the centerfolds of
Ranger Rick
magazine. The small rips the staples made in the middle always bothered me.

He brings a glass of water for me; a beer for him. We sit on his futon couch and talk about what happened.

"You have to know, we all love you," he says.

I suppose by "we" he means him and the others. It occurs to me that he hasn't called the others yet.
But who exactly are the others
? He puts his hand on my knee. I look at it for a second and then at him.
There are no others
.

"I have to go," I say.

"No, don't go," he says. "Come lie down with me for a second."

I see in the other room a double bed with a burgundy comforter and one pillow. It's a sad, sad bed.

"I have to go," I say.

"No, you can't leave." He reaches out to grab my arm, but doesn't. "I have to go."

Outside his apartment, I don't wait for the elevator. I take the stairs, leave the building, and run.

At home, there are three messages from my boyfriend Tom. He's a grad student in U.S. history and I'm in art history; we've both been given scholarships and stipends by Columbia to pursue degrees we're not sure we want. I feel guilty about my ten-thousand-dollar stipend; he doesn't. "It was their decision to give it to us," he says. I hate his conviction on the subject.

I met him with my mother. She came to town when I moved here in September. We were sitting on the steps to Low Library sharing one cup of coffee and two muffins. When a few sections of our newspaper blew away, Tom caught them and brought them back over to us. He asked if he could keep the sports.

"Are you an athlete?" my mother asked him. She starts up conversations with everybody. "I don't know if I'm an athlete," he said, and shrugged. "I swim."

"I can see," my mother said. I looked at my mom.

"His hair," she said to me, but loud enough so he could hear. "It has a little green. You can see it in the sun."

"Mom," I said. To him, this man I'd never met, I mouthed, "I'm sorry." But she was right: his hair was light blond, but up front by his ears there were some greenish strands.

"I always thought the green came from eating too much celery," he said, and smiled. "Where are you from?"

"How did you know I was from somewhere else?" my mother asked. She refuses to admit everyone notices her Italian accent; to some it's impenetrable. My father told me that with every year she's been in America, her accent has intensified.

"I'm from Naples," she said.

Tom had been to Naples. He'd particularly liked the Castel Nuovo, he said. "Sit down and join us," said my mother, and he did.

My mother thought he was funny and handsome, and I liked that he liked my mom. I hate people who don't find her perfect.

During his junior year Tom lived in Israel; on our first date, after my mother had left town, he showed me a photo of him wearing a gas mask. He likes falafel and can fit a whole one in his large mouth. He can fit his entire fist in his mouth, but I hate it when he does that.

Sometimes his breath tastes like falafel and red wine and I don't mind because it tastes like travel, a bit like danger. It tastes like driving fast on a lesser-known dirt road in a country you're visiting for the first time.

But recently, within the last few weeks, there were suddenly so many men I could fall in love with—
you on the subway who gave up your seat for a pregnant woman; you at the deli, popping a stuffed grape leaf in your mouth when you thought no one was looking; you who, outside the church, after Sarah's brother's funeral, opened up an umbrella for me, its spokes stretching above my head like the rays of a Byzantine halo.

Three nights ago, Tom stopped by my apartment to say hi. "I'm not sure if we shouldn't see other people," I told him.

Tom, until recently a lover of many women, shrugged.

"Hey, if you don't want something full-time," he said, "then, well, then I'm your guy." And the way he said it was so endearing I wanted him to be mine and only mine. I wanted me to be only with him. I wanted to want that.

Tonight his voice on the machine is anxious and I know he's heard what's happened. I don't even stop to wonder how or from whom; anything is possible. As soon as I've heard the messages the phone rings. I stare at it and wait.

"Ellis?" a voice calls out after the beep. "Are you there? Pick up if you're there."

It's Tom. No one calls me "Ellis" except him and my mom. Most people call me El, but there are men who have called me Baby, Monkey, Sweetness, and Deborah. Deborah came before me with Tom. He called me Deborah not in bed, but in the kitchen, twice.

I pick up the phone. "I'm here," I say.

He breathes a loud sigh. "I'm so glad you're okay." He tells me to stay put and he'll be right over.

I lie down on my bed. I want to call someone but no one seems like the right person to call. I could call Freddie, but know she'll worry too much. She's two years younger and my life causes her concern. When we were young, most of her diary entries were about how she'd been snooping in my diaries and was worried about my choice of friends, the alcohol I drank with them at parties, the lies I told my parents. After that, I started writing only positive, Panglossed versions of events. She fell for it. Her own diaries expressed relief that I'd changed for the better.

I call Sarah in Ireland, though it's late her time. The day after we graduated from college, she moved to Dublin, where she'd always wanted to live. There, she has two jobs: she's a nanny to twin boys, and a skipper on a tourist boat that goes up and down the River Liffey. Sarah must be near the water. In the two photos I have of her on my desk, her lightish brown hair is dark from just-taken showers. On spring breaks we'd drive to wherever there was water: Florida, Lake Champlain, the Jersey shore.

I get her answering machine. It's Sarahs voice doing a fake Irish accent.

I leave all the details after the beep. I tell her how I recited that one poem to the tune of a Liz Phair song. Sarah loves Liz Phair. When the machine cuts me off, I call back.

The intercom buzzes and I let Tom up. "That was fast," I say.

"I ran," he says. I can tell by the way he's eyeing me that I must look awful.

He hugs me and I feel torn between burrowing my head under his sweater and keeping him at an arm's distance. Beneath his scarf, his neck smells of chlorine.

"Did you swim today?"

"No, yesterday," he says. "Do I still smell?" I shrug.

"Why didn't you call me right away?" he asks.

I tell him I didn't know how he would react. I needed someone who would react in the right way.