A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (20 page)

“Wow,” he said, unable to stop himself. It was like something building and rushing up within him: a flood, a stampede, a cloudburst, an eruption, an economic boom. “You look nice.”

Marshall watched mortified as the words emerged from his lips and hung in the air between them. Joyce’s mascaraed eyes locked on his for the first time in months. Her exquisitely prepared face—he just noticed the makeup—crimsoned almost to
the color of her lipstick. She took a step back, almost tripping over her heels.

“Fuck you,” she cried. “Fuck you. Just totally and completely and absolutely fuck you.”

She rushed from the apartment, slamming the door. A moment later Marshall thought he heard anguished mutterings in the hall by the elevator.

“Mommy said a bad word,” Victor observed.

Marshall groaned and fell back to the floor, Victor’s sneaker in his hand. With their legal combat approaching resolution, with every weakness and misstep exploited to the max, this was the wrong moment to go off-message; at the same time, Joyce’s breakdown represented for her a serious battlefield loss. Her upset was mysterious, emphasizing again his ignorance of everything that went on inside her mind. He turned to Viola. She knew more than he thought.

“The compliment,” she explained.

Joyce had looked terrific, as young and as fresh as when they were courting. Marshall recalled a time when he thought he needed to be with her every moment of the day. He had once driven two hundred miles in the middle of the night only to walk her from dorm to class in the morning. When she had opened her door the light of her smile was like the sun coming up. He said now, “I see.”

“And she’s nervous. It’s a first date.”

“A date?”

Viola nodded somberly but then let go with a grin, delighted to know something her father didn’t. Marshall was stunned. He and Joyce weren’t divorced yet or even legally separated—she couldn’t date. He was going to tell Thorpe. Meanwhile the sidewalks were swimming with adorable women who checked him out from the corners of their eyes, interested, available. Marshall had presumed that he would be the first to date.

“With an FIB agent,” she said.

“A what?”

“They catch terrorists.”

“FBI, and hardly ever. What do you know about FBI agents? What do you know about
dates
?”

“It took a while,” she said. “But I figured it out. You have to pay attention.”

MARSHALL WAS TORN
by indecision the following morning. He could have aligned what was left of his investments with Joyce’s, proportionately augmenting his tiny 401(k) while hers continued to balloon—but could he stand for her to retire a multimillionaire? The alternative was to simply sell off her investments and stick the cash in a money market, where it could sit and smolder and be eaten away by inflation for the next thirty years. As he came off the elevator he became aware of an unusual human hum within the office, with many of his colleagues outside the cubicles conferring with each other in low voices. He breezed past them and went right to his computer. But something was wrong with it: he couldn’t log on to the local network.

“Hey. Marshall-man.”

Marshall turned to look behind him. It was one of his coworkers, Eduardo, the young slacker guy who worked opposite Marshall in the new office just as he had in the World Trade Center. On the morning of September 11 he had been on the way to his dentist for root canal. Everyone knew that. The survivors were identified each by how they had survived.

“What’s wrong with the system?” Marshall asked. “It’s down?”

“Most certainly.”

Marshall felt a prickling on the back of his neck. He looked around the room. Every computer screen was like his, the company logo dominating it like a test pattern. His colleagues
seemed relaxed about this, chatting amiably with each other. A few shook hands, others kissed, others handed out cardboard boxes.

“Where’s Hudson?”

“Ah, Bill Hudson,” said Eduardo ruminatively. “Dear sweet Bill. Fired. Sacked. Defenestrated. Exiled. Sent to The Hague.”

“How could they fire him?” Marshall was so surprised he could hardly keep from laughing. “Look what he did for the company after 9/11—he pieced together our records, he established the new office, he brought us back from the dead. I thought he was a company hero. Anyway, the CEO said no one was going to lose their jobs.”

“Yeah, he’s fired too. Almost the entire management team is gone, last I heard. The stock’s up, though.”

“Gee,” said Marshall, thinking it through. He hardly knew the people in Florida. The New York office’s relationship with the company headquarters had always been distant, corporate command loosely directed by unseen deities detached from actual human labors. “Where does that leave us?”

Eduardo raised his arm majestically. “Go to the bulletin board; it’s over by the Eternal Flame. They’ve listed the times for our exit interviews.”

Marshall again surveyed the room, finding few signs of emotional upset. His colleagues were quietly going through their desks for their personal items and removing from their cubicles photos, posters, and other wall ephemera he hadn’t noticed before. Within a few hours the physical evidence of their careers would be gone forever, lost in the entropic mists.

“The stock’s up?”

“Five points since the opening.”

“And we can’t log on?”

Eduardo smiled sadly. Something shifted within the spectrum of the office’s visible light; Marshall heard in the ambient
office noise change in pitch as well. It was too late now, even if he went to an Internet café and accessed their accounts from there, even if he had Joyce’s password. The market moment had passed and its departure continued to vibrate through his body. He became aware, his heart thumping as regularly as clockwork, that he was living in normal time again, the ordinary, nonfungible, consistently paced sequencing of events, consuming it as surely and as steadily as he consumed his remaining cash. Thorpe had sent him another bill. Marshall would pay it with a chunk from his stockpile and then stand back and watch, as everyone did, as the remaining days, hours, and minutes skittered away.

N
EWS OF JOYCÉS ESPRESSO MAKER
made everyone at court angry: Joyce’s lawyer as well as Marshall’s, the judge, the stenographer. The two parties had been wrestling over the smallest trivialities for months, and the appliance represented yet another detail that would upset entirely every provisional calculation and agreement. The decisive court hearing earlier in the summer had turned out to be not decisive at all, with the judge wearily warning that a settlement negotiated by the parties would prove fairer and more workable than anything he would devise; in any case he was going on vacation. He sent them back into the increasingly warm and fetid conference room. It seemed to Joyce she had already spent a considerable fraction of her adult life in this room, its physical details indelibly scratched into her memory. Time halted within its confines, so that the third meeting between them and their lawyers perfectly coexisted with the eighteenth, preceding and succeeding it at once; the only evidence of nonsimultaneity was the accretion of billable hours. New points were raised about the most excruciatingly banal trifles of their household life—who made the kids’ lunches, who bought the laundry detergent. Both Joyce and Marshall silently wondered if these
issues hadn’t already been resolved. When they left the court, taking care not to leave at the same moment or ride the same train home, they each sensed that they hadn’t been in court at all, that they had only imagined it. About the espresso maker, Joyce had protested, embarrassed, “It was only $699.95!”

MEANWHILE
, Thorpe was unimpressed and even contemptuous when Marshall told him about Joyce’s date. “You want to prove adultery? Good luck, my friend. You’re going to subpoena the kid? The G-man? This will go on for another two years, and I’d be glad to take your money but you don’t have it—and what’s the point? It’s a common mistake, thinking that grounds will determine the terms of your judgment. She won’t get less, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Okay, okay. I just thought I should tell you.”

Thorpe leaned his shiplike bulk forward over his desk and grinned. “Do you think they’re fucking? Actually fucking? You know, she
looks
like she’s had some sex. You, on the other hand…”

WITHIN THE INDUSTRY
there was a certain amount of curiosity about meeting someone who had lived through 9/11 and his former company’s famously abrupt restructuring. Marshall engaged in several employment-related conversations that started off mostly as convivial talks with middle managers who knew him by reputation and ended as slightly cooler, more formal dead-end interviews. He was presumed to be hireable, but when he arrived tieless, his shoes scuffed, his facial stubble a micrometer too long, he seemed to have brought with him more than his share of the world’s anxieties. He sat on the edge of his chair, his eyes darting, and responded to questions with artless concision. The interview would conclude with a firm handshake.
Although he looked good on paper, with the economy in slow recovery no one felt compelled to offer him a position.

He went into Manhattan every day anyway, just as he had in the weeks after 9/11. When he asked himself what he would do when his cash ran out, he heard no reply: the future was an echoless void. He had no plans, no road map. In the meantime he lost himself in the swell of office-going humanity, walking fast as if he were late and idly humming to himself. Some of the tunes were religious hymns from his childhood. The days were warm and bright, Mediterranean; at the same time the sky seemed unnaturally close, at the scraping edges of the city’s towers, a transparent glass bowl.

Or it was like a teardrop swelling before its fall. Or like a child’s spinning top in its terminal wobble. Or like a blow before its pain was registered. One day when Marshall was walking east in the Twenties between Lexington and Third avenues the entire morning came down with an enormous crash.

This was the result of a heavy steel grille being slammed shut on the back of a truck parked in a loading zone, but in the three or four seconds required to identify the noise, Marshall found himself reeling, his limbs ripped from his body, his clothes bloody and torn. The impact was felt by other passersby as well. An elderly lady clutched her bosom. Two women office workers walking side by side grabbed each other by the hand. A man walking with a small child reflexively leaned over to protect her from something neither could see. Even the deliveryman who dropped the grille flinched.

Suicide bomb:
this was the thought they held in common. Yesterday, seven time zones ahead, a Palestinian youth dressed as an Orthodox Jew had rushed past a guard into a Tel Aviv corner pizzeria, cried out in Arabic, “God is great!” and blown himself up along with nearly everyone inside. The total body count had come to seventeen and the pictures had been all over the news last night and this morning. The attack followed two
others this week on public buses, each claiming diverse victims: Jews, Arabs, a Filipino woman, soldiers, civilians, schoolchildren, two nursing mothers and their infants. Dozens more had been hurt badly enough to suffer their injuries for the rest of their lives. Last week a bomb at Hebrew University had destroyed a cafeteria named in honor of Frank Sinatra, killing nine and wounding eighty-five.

The New York television news replayed the scenes of devastation every half hour, as often as the traffic reports. The pizzeria had been gutted, its walls scorched, its plastic checkered tablecloths, chairs, oregano shakers, and paper soda cups torn, smashed, and scattered, yet it remained as recognizable as any New York pizzeria. The camera slowly panned the wreckage. Thousands of New Yorkers knew that Tel Aviv intersection precisely, knew that pizzeria and could argue the merits of its crust relative to the crust produced by the pizzeria across the street. A cash register was upended. A charred pizza box lay closed on the floor, the same jolly, fat-faced chef declaring, as he did all over the world, “You’ve tried the rest, now try the best!” The faces and biographies of the dead were intimately familiar too: the piano tuner, the doctor and father of five stopping to pick up dinner, the truck driver, the babysitter, the electronics store clerk, the only child, the teacher, and the nurse whose salary was supporting her family in a Manila shanty. In a single moment these individuals were linked together for the rest of eternity by another ordinary person, some high school kid from Nablus, good with his hands. Marshall had just passed a newsstand whose papers screamed their grief and rage.

Here on East Twenty-fifth or Twenty-sixth Street the pedestrians who had been startled by the falling grille straightened their postures and stared at each other without embarrassment. They were about halfway between the two avenues, about nine or ten of them stationed like chess pieces on either side of the street, their powers of motion in check. Marshall studied them
as they studied him, images of their faces, clothes, shoes, haircuts, and demeanors collected and carried into the lifeless future. Even the deliveryman who had brought down the grille remained where he was.

The pedestrians would each move again in their separate anonymous ways, but within this moment they lived the terror as it had been experienced within the pizzeria, by the bomber and his victims together. The boy had probably been praying to a distinctly conceived God not to lose courage; he must have been simultaneously aware of the rush of time transporting him to the explosive instant; the patrons were sprinting along the lines of their own thoughts and personal dramas, their love affairs, their work conflicts, their sporting enthusiasms; the youth probably found his field of vision tightly narrowing once he made it past the guard into the pizzeria; inside they must have known immediately why a youth dressed as an Orthodox Jew would be rushing past the guard; he shouted,
“Allahu Akbar!”
reported the wounded, failed, severely questioned guard; they didn’t see him press the trigger; the boy pressed the trigger (in his pocket, beneath his black coat?); this was followed by an ultima of total clarity in which the bomber and his victims saw every detail of every aspect of their environment crystallized into that minute and second of that day in the month of August in the year 2002. In a single lightning flash the unconnected parts of the world had been brought together and made into sense. No,
sense
was not made. This was a world of heedless materialism, impiety, baseness, and divorce. Sense was not made, this was jihad: the unconnected parts of the world had been brought together and made
just
.

And then the survivors on East Twenty-seventh Street did proceed and the moment was shuffled into the deck alongside innumerable other moments lost to history. Most of the pedestrians would forget the incident—it was not even an incident—before they reached the ends of the block.

JOYCE HAD WATCHED
the television reports from Israel as well and, riding the train beneath the East River, she saw the
Post
s and
News
es on the other passengers’ laps open to the atrocity. The photos ran across several pages, the pizzeria wreckage flanked by yearbook pictures of the victims and shots of emergency personnel carrying the wounded on stretchers to ambulances emblazoned with slanted, razor-edged Hebrew lettering. Looking up and down the subway car, hearing the ominous rapid thump of its wheels against the tracks, Joyce was riveted by the thought of a suicide bomb’s spectacular effect here: the noise, the fire, the flying glass and shrapnel, the overcoming, roaring rush of water and estuary silt. The terrorists were on their way. It could happen before the next thump.

She closed her eyes to rest them. The journey under the river took hours, it seemed, but she was in no hurry to arrive at the hate-drenched apartment she shared with her not-yet-ex-husband. She despised the place. It was small and dark, everything in it was broken, she hated her neighbors, and she was sick of living in New York. For the same money she could buy a house in the suburbs with a backyard and a garden. A garden. She had never wanted one before, but now she ardently wished for a garden.

She wished she could start over—yes, with the kids, though not necessarily (as long as she was fantasizing about a new life). She fixed on the idea of leaving New York, this cramped, violent, bitterly competitive, small-minded city that had never been a real home, where she had become a victim. She wanted to start a vegetable garden somewhere and spend more time with her face in the sun, her bare arms plunged into the soil. She wanted to inhale deeply and smell moist, fecund, freshly dug earth. She would buy comfortable work boots, flattering in their rugged utility. Feeding herself with food grown from her
own efforts, she thought, would change her entire character; it would make her more self-sufficient, more capable of standing up for herself. She opened her eyes. God, she was buried underwater in a fluorescent-lit steel tomb.

At last she arrived at Borough Hall and dragged her body through the streets, barely able to face another several hours of silent combat with Marshall. They had been alternating evenings minding the kids, but she couldn’t afford to go out to a restaurant or movie every night he was home with them. To ignore him, to avoid getting involved with his haphazard parenting, she would have to sit by herself in the kitchen—when what she needed was to be alone in her own home, without a single artifact or residue or aroma or memory of his existence. She needed to be on her own before she could begin the process of self-repair or reinvention.

But Marshall wasn’t home. When she opened the door, their babysitter Sonya was standing in the living room, wearing her coat and holding an oversized shopping bag. She had been staring at the door, waiting for it to open. Joyce saw at once that her eyes were moist.

“It’s a quarter before seven!” Sonya cried. “My family needs me. My daughter has to go to work. She can’t leave the baby!”

“Where’s my husband?”

Sonya gave her a hopeless, grief-stricken, accusatory expression—he’s
your
husband!—with which Joyce was already familiar. Sonya had been a high school physics teacher in Tashkent before immigrating to Israel right before the Gulf War. After a tumultuous decade she and her family had made it to the U.S. with their nerves shattered and their circumstances severely reduced. In Tashkent the Jewish faculty had been fired; in Israel a Scud had struck near their housing complex, and her son-in-law’s army unit had suffered casualties in Gaza; in Brooklyn, after 9/11, she took to her bed for a week, convinced that world history was hot on her trail, about to rap its
knuckles on her door. Victor and Viola loved her, but Joyce had once wondered if Sonya was simply too pessimistic an influence on their lives. Now she didn’t find her pessimism extreme at all.

“He was supposed to be home by six!” Joyce protested, opening her bag and riffling through her purse. “That’s what we arranged.”

“My daughter will lose her job!”

“Okay, I’m sorry, I’m terribly sorry,” said Joyce, thrusting a twenty at her. “Take a cab. I’m sorry, I don’t know what happened.”

Sonya raced from the apartment, not even saying good-bye. Joyce could hear her in the hall, punching repeatedly at the elevator call button.

The kids at once clamored for dinner. Joyce went to the kitchen, Sonya’s lamentations still ringing in her ears. As they faded Joyce’s own anger started to build. There had never been any question that Marshall was supposed to relieve Sonya at six today—no question at all! He was willfully negligent of his children’s welfare. For a moment she was so blinded by fury that she couldn’t see the contents of the refrigerator. She simply stood there, smoldering within a cloud of refrigerated air. Victor and Viola observed her hesitation and demanded to be taken for pizza.

“No, no pizza,” she said, but the kids picked up on her weariness as well and she had to give in. Fuck it. She didn’t want to cook. Once they made it to the street, she was sufficiently demoralized to be persuaded to bring them to Marshall’s low-rent pizzeria on Court Street, instead of the brick-oven pizza restaurant on Montague, which served wine and excellent Atkins-sensitive salads.