A Disorder Peculiar to the Country

O
N THE WAY
to Newark Joyce received a call: the talks in Berkeley had collapsed, conclusively. She closed her eyes for a few moments and then asked the driver to turn around and head back through the tunnel. It was still early morning. She went directly to her office on Hudson Street to sort out the repercussions from the negotiations’ failure—and especially how to evade blame for their failure. About an hour later colleagues were trickling in, passing by her open door, and Joyce thought she heard someone say that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. The World Trade Center: the words provoked a thought like a small underground animal to dash from its burrow into the light before promptly scuttling back in retreat. She wasn’t sure she had heard the news correctly; perhaps she had simply imagined it, or had even dozed off and dreamed it after less than five hours of sleep the night before. Fighting distraction, she pondered the phrasing of her report, resolved not to be defensive; at the same time she wondered whether something had just happened that would dominate the news for months to come, until everyone was sick of it. In that case there would be plenty of time to find out what it was. She presumed the plane had been a small one,
causing localized damage, if it was a plane at all, “if the World Trade Center had been involved at all. The towers weren’t visible from her office window, but she could see several of the company slackers in the adjacent roof garden, smoking cigarettes and looking downtown. She worked for a few minutes and then suddenly she heard screaming and shouts. She thought someone had fallen off the roof.

Even now Joyce moved without hurrying, careful first to save what was on her screen. If someone had fallen she would shortly learn who, and the consequences would play out either with or without her. But as she stepped through the door to the roof she understood from their continuing shrieks what her colleagues had just witnessed: a
second
plane striking the World Trade Center. Every face of every man and woman on the roof was twisted by fear and shock. One belonged to the unyielding, taciturn company director, who had never before been seen to express emotion; now his mouth dangled open and blood rushed to his face as if he were being choked. Among her colleagues tears had begun to flow only a moment earlier. Women buried their faces in the chests of coworkers with whom they were hardly friendly. “No, no, no, no,” someone murmured.

Joyce turned and saw the two pillars, one with a fiery red gash in its midsection, the other with its upper stories sheathed in heavy gray smoke. Sirens keened below. She could hear the crackle and chuffing of the burning buildings more than a mile away.

Nearly everyone in the firm had now come onto the roof, crowding shoulder to shoulder. Joyce stood among her colleagues rapt and numb and yet also acutely aware of the late summer morning’s clear blue skies that mocked the city below. A portable radio was brought out. Joyce’s colleagues haltingly speculated about what had happened, the size of the planes, how
two
planes could possibly have crashed in the same place at
the same time. Their conversations withered in the heated confusion and terror spilling from the radio.

After a while one of the towers, the one farther south, appeared to exhale a terrific sigh of combustion products. They swirled away and half the building, about fifty or sixty stories, bowed forward on a newly manufactured hinge. And then the building fell in on itself in what seemed to be a single graceful motion, as if its solidity had been a mirage, as if the structure had been liquid all these years since it was built. Smoke and debris in all the possible shades of black, gray, and white billowed upward, flooding out around the neighboring buildings. You had to make an effort to keep before you the thought that thousands of people were losing their lives at precisely this moment.

Many of the roofs in the neighborhood were occupied, mostly by office workers. They had their hands to their faces, either at their mouths or at their temples, but none covered their eyes. They were unable to turn away. Joyce heard gasps and groans and appeals to God’s absent mercy. A woman beside her sobbed without restraint. But Joyce felt something erupt inside her, something warm, very much like, yes it was, a pang of pleasure, so intense it was nearly like the appeasement of hunger. It was a giddiness, an elation. The deep-bellied roar of the tower’s collapse finally reached her and went on for minutes, it seemed, followed by an unnaturally warm gust that pushed back her hair and ruffled her blouse. The building turned into a rising mushroom-shaped column of smoke, dust, and perished life, and she felt a great gladness.

“Joyce, oh my God!” cried a colleague. “I just remembered. Doesn’t your husband work there?”

She nodded slowly. His office was on the eighty-sixth floor of the south tower, which had just been removed whole from the face of the earth. She covered the lower part of her face to hide her fierce, protracted struggle against the emergence of a smile.

THEY HAD BEEN INSTRUCTED
to communicate with each other only through their lawyers, an injunction impossible to obey since Joyce and Marshall still shared a two-bedroom apartment with their two small children and a yapping, emotionally needy, razor-nailed springer spaniel Marshall had recently brought home without consulting anyone, not even his lawyer. (The children had been delighted.) In the year since they had begun divorcing, the couple had developed a conversation-independent system for their day-to-day lives, mostly centered on who would deposit the kids at day care (usually Joyce) and who would collect them (usually Marshall), and also who would make their lunches, talk to the caregivers about which particular problems, buy the groceries, do the laundry, make dinner for the kids, be with the kids on which weekend, and so on. Whenever something disrupted this system—and something would disrupt it several times a day: either a borderline fever, or an evening business appointment, or some toilet-training backsliding, or the inexplicable consumption of a completely full half gallon of milk purchased the day before—Joyce and Marshall were forced to speak to each other, and even the most trivial discussion was likely to escalate into a blistering argument encompassing all the issues that had brought them to divorce in the first place.

It was in a previous decade, another century, that this had started out civilly, as an agreement reached almost affectionately, that their marriage was not as warm as it had been. In the six months of therapy in which they were encouraged to break down the barriers that prevented them from speaking frankly, Joyce and Marshall discovered that they hated each other. Issues that had never before come up—money, sex, children, vacation destinations, Joyce’s weight gain, and wildly differing estimates of Marshall’s contribution to the child-rearing enter
prise—now misted the air blue within the counselor’s office, which had already been made stale by the arguments from the previous couple’s appointment. The counselor finally urged them to make the break nonadversarial and referred them to divorce arbitration. Now all the arguments fell away or were subsumed by a single point of disagreement: money. Marshall’s salary was substantially larger than the salary earned by Joyce, who had twice changed careers and had twice interrupted them to give birth. She demanded the apartment and that he should continue paying half the mortgage and child support as well as some to-be-determined maintenance. Once they reached this impasse, and after returning to it every week for several months, they gave up on arbitration and hired individual lawyers, a woman for Joyce, a man for Marshall. The lawyers turned out to be friends and kissed each other hello when they met.

Even before Joyce and Marshall stepped together onto the path meant to separate them, their two salaries had been insufficient. Two-thirds of their total take-home pay was consumed by the mortgage and maintenance on their ill-lit, inadequately maintained, brilliantly located co-op in Brooklyn Heights. They both cherished the apartment and the surrounding streets, their painfully won toehold in New York. Their front window faced another apartment building, but beyond it lay Manhattan, of which they could see the very top floors of the World Trade Center. It would have been impossible for Marshall to continue paying
any
part of the mortgage and at the same time rent elsewhere in the neighborhood, or in any half-safe neighborhood within the city—a conundrum that satisfied Joyce in the same way she might have been satisfied by some classic philosophical puzzle. She wanted to ruin him, not only financially but personally, and not just for now, but forever.

How
he
hated
her
. He could have written sonnets of hatred, made vows on his hatred, performed daring, heroic feats of physical labor to prove his hatred. Late at night he would some
times glimpse her sleeping form on the couch—he had refused to give up the bedroom; Viola, their four-year-old daughter, persisted in the belief that her mother fell asleep watching TV every night—and Marshall would be seized by such passionate loathing that he would lie awake for hours, clenching and unclenching his fists. It was probably just as well that he couldn’t sleep, because when he did he ground his teeth, according to his dentist, who said that he could tell from the marks in his enamel that he was getting divorced. Some repairs that he couldn’t afford were recommended. Either in bed or in the dentist’s chair with his damaged, doomed mouth hanging open, he thought again of what Joyce had done to him. Her pettiness and irrationality had brought the entire structure of their lives down on their heads, down on the heads of their kids. He was humiliated by his inability to expunge the memory of having loved her once as romantically as he hated her now.

He plotted; she knew it. Marshall worked stealthily, finding allies among distant acquaintances and family; he passed damaging gossip untraceably; he undermined Joyce’s resolve by preempting her complaints with mirror-image accusations. Nothing in her life was beyond his reach: even her father had made an obliquely critical comment that suggested he had heard something somehow unfavorable to her, but the presumed charge was too vague to be contested. Marshall spoke rudely to her colleagues when they telephoned with important messages, which he never passed on. He resumed leaving the toilet seat up, his straight razor soapy and wet at the edge of the basin, and his underwear on the bathroom floor: all habits she had exorcised from the household years ago. He was making remarks to the kids; she heard their echoes in their questions at bedtime: Why do you look so old? Why don’t you like Snuffles? Snuffles was the dog, a slobbering, stinking, slacks-tearing instrument in Marshall’s campaign against her, a war fought in the shadows.

The divorcing transpired within a universe in which time was an elusive, shadowed quantity. Joyce swore that she’d have him out by the end of the year; with the year left unspecified, Marshall defied the oath. He countered that she would need to file a motion; his lawyer filed an opposing brief; this took an entire winter. Holidays intervened. The apartment had to be appraised, another process profligate of Joyce’s office-desk Joke-a-Day Calendar; they hired competing appraisers, jinn and sorcerers who turned gold into lead and vice versa. Marshall’s fine arts degree, which he had earned during some of their time together and therefore supported her claim to his future earnings even though it had no bearing on his current career, also had to be appraised, twice. Legal fees rapidly depleted their savings accounts, which were not only divided and separated, but had been placed in competing banks, located in nonadjacent boroughs. Feelings between Joyce and Marshall acquired the intensity of something historic, tribal, and ethnic, and when they watched news of wars on TV, reports from the Balkans or the West Bank, they would think, yes, yes, yes, that’s how I feel about
you
.

Meanwhile their two children—products of their former love, their marriage’s fatal complications, their divorce’s civilian casualties—had to be raised. Joyce and Marshall watched them on alternate weekends, but Marshall believed that to maintain his moral right to the residence he should remain in the apartment on Joyce’s weekends. He occupied most of these in the bedroom, with the door closed provocatively, ominously, without even the hum of his television audible. He left it only to feed and walk Snuffles, which Joyce refused to do, even when Marshall wasn’t home and the dog was frantic. He had been forced to subscribe to a dog-care service.

Something seemed to stress, fault, and shift these two impacted continental plates one Sunday afternoon at the end of August. Joyce had just arrived at the playground with the chil
dren; two-year-old Victor sat on the asphalt by the park bench examining a piece of foil while Viola climbed on the playground equipment. Suddenly Viola rushed to her mother, laughing. She had a very sweet smile and could be a tender, affectionate child; sometimes her parents gazed into her bright brown eyes and completely forgot that they had ever been unhappy. “Poop!” she announced. It ran wet down her legs. The girl was already four; Joyce swore bitterly. Viola laughed at that too. Fortunately, Joyce had brought changes of clothes with her. She grabbed several baby wipes from her bag and tried to clean Viola’s legs, but the girl’s overalls were full of it and the stream was too intense: she was still pooping, willfully. “Stop it,” Joyce said. “Stop it right now.” Joyce wanted to drop the wipes, lie facedown on the bench, cradle her face in her arms, and quietly cry herself to sleep, floating away from this life on a river of tears. Other mothers and caregivers, no one she knew, watched coldly; even some kids with a basketball, usually oblivious to anything but the basketball, observed her. She lifted Viola by the arms and carried her around the locked toilets to a garbage receptacle, trying to keep the girl’s body away from hers. She unfastened the snaps of the overalls and let the whole shitty mess drop into the trash. Viola would have outgrown them anyway. With one hand suspending the girl over the garbage, Joyce used wipes in the other to remove the turds. It took about a minute, maybe two. The girl was still filthy. Joyce swung her bare-assed and giggling back to their things—but she saw that at their bench by the stroller something was horribly wrong. Her stomach pitched. Vic was bawling, bawling furiously, in the arms of a crazy man, a disheveled, wild-eyed, gesticulating, spitting man: her husband. He was with the dog.