Lightning People (41 page)

“It's been rough, you know,” he mumbled weakly. “I'm as fine as can be expected.”

“That's good.”

He smiled nervously. They both concentrated on a sign hanging across the street. A commercial jet flew overhead on its descent into JFK.

“I waited . . . ” she said but didn't know how to finish that sentence.

“I do want to see you,” he replied quietly, those glacial blue eyes fixed on her face in either honesty or pity. “Maybe this week if you have some time. Or next. I know I told you I'd call when I landed—”

“Don't worry about it. It's a bad time for you. I can't expect you to think of me as soon as you touch down. Are you off somewhere now?” She asked this pleadingly, one last gesture, one final attempt at reparation, because the thought of walking east against the sunset on this soulless excuse for a conversation seemed worse than grabbing him by the waist and begging for him to go upstairs, undress, and climb into the recesses of his bed to wait for her knock. They
could have that again, it would be so easy, a mere cheat on the last two minutes.

“I'm actually off to meet a woman,” he said.

“Oh.”

“It's not what it sounds like. It's complicated. I don't know her really.”

“Okay. Well, I'll let you go. Give me a call when you find some free time.”

“I will, Del. I mean it. I'd like that. It really meant so much . . . ” She spun around and lifted her hand in a half-hearted wave and started moving down the block before she could complete the gesture. She walked down Twenty-Fourth Street, marching straight ahead, measuring her inhales and exhales, as the dirty wind stung her eyes. She wouldn't cry. She'd keep the water frozen behind her eyes until she was far away from his building and then, like slamming an ice-cube tray against the knee, let all of it break loose in one snap.

Del got all the way to the corner before she let herself look back. The block was deserted. Raj had gone in another direction. She lit a cigarette, blew the tobacco into her lungs, and, two minutes later, snuffed it out, all of which was more than enough time for Raj to come to reclaim her, reaching his hands out, apologizing for bad nerves, saying all of the things that she assumed he had wanted to say to her and, of course, so stupid of her, never had, not even when they had been together as a couple the first time.
So it's like that
, she said to herself,
the same as it always was
, and crossed Tenth Avenue with her purse slumped against her stomach. Was there any deeper humiliation than running across Manhattan for someone who was on his way to meet another woman?

A block later, Del found a bar with a neon shamrock blinking palely in the window. She entered and ordered a double scotch, while wiping her face with a cocktail napkin. The bar was filled with older, bloated men keeping eye contact with their liquor, who could no longer remember any reason for running across town. They had already made their peace with the limits of their hearts. Del took the scotch down in a single gulp and ordered another round.

CECILE DOZOL LIVED in the fourth-floor loft of an old granary building on the Bowery just above Houston Street. BOUWERIE GRANERE read the faded words painted on the dilapidated brick, and a wooden pulley wheel floated in the top window, a testament to an old world that pushed the rental prices up for authentic loft living.

Raj had suggested meeting at a coffee shop in the East Village, but the woman on the phone who had just introduced herself in a sedate British accent moaned in disapproval. “Too many people staring. Why don't you come up to my apartment?”

“Are you sure that's safe?” he had asked, surprised by the intimacy put forward to a complete stranger.

“For you or for me?” she had replied, her accent slipping like the Eurostar train under the English Channel into a lazy French indolence. “
Yee
, just come. It's quieter here, and we can talk.” He rang her buzzer and climbed four flights of stairs with railings overgrown in locked bicycles. When he got to her floor, pressing his hand along the splintered banister, the only door on the landing creaked open. A young woman stood in the frame wearing a tight yellow dress made out of surgical bandages. Brown-blonde hair was
tied loosely back in the day's fashion, artfully unruly so strands fizzed and snarled like a nest of branches. In comparison to her head, her arms and waist were so thin it looked as if her body had withered into a vine to produce this tremendous, ripe face. Cecile was not the kind of innocent bystander that Raj had expected to discuss the death of his sister with. Although she pointed a toothbrush at him threateningly, she offered the kind of demure, chin-lowered glare that she must instinctively bestow upon every member of the opposite sex to indicate that to know Cecile Dozol was to want to sleep with her immediately. She was barefoot, and her legs were sharp and skinny and oiled like African sculptures, only coming into contact with each other at the knees. Raj smiled the irritable smile of a man who did want to sleep with Cecile Dozol but understood he didn't have a chance with her. She returned the favor, her grin surprisingly lopsided and sincere, bearing crooked yellow teeth. She looked like the daughter of someone famous, a more equine, street-smart version of the insurmountable beauty her mother must have been, and Raj mentally scanned through the tear sheets of his twenties when he occasionally shot fashion editorials for magazines.

“I'm sorry to be dressed like this. It is disrespectful,” she said, more French than English, though the words sounded wealthy no matter where they hailed from. “I must go to a party in an hour, and they make me wear this.” Cecile beckoned him in with a wave of her toothbrush, and soon Raj was standing in a darkened loft with a high, tin ceiling and linen pillows arranged in groupings on the floor like circular crop patterns in Iowa cornfields. The place smelled of marijuana and dried flowers. Mapplethorpe black-and-whites were framed but left leaning against the wall under awaiting brass hooks; owning them was a commitment to taste, hanging them was too much of a commitment to residency. A laptop computer sat on a bookcase with its screensaver cascading smoky rainbows. An acoustic guitar lay on a wooden card table by the kitchenette, the table's legs bound with silver gaffer tape. She kicked a black garment bag that must have once held the dress she wore and extended her arm toward a chair with its cane weaving broken out on the back. Raj was so overtaken with the exotic richness of the world he had
suddenly stumbled into he felt embarrassment at the reason for his visit.

“Hervé Léger,” Cecile said in the easy rhythm of a native tongue, sucking her stomach in and hiking the top of the dress up over her breasts.

“What does that mean?”

“The designer,” she replied. “It's so gruesomely tight. But if you agree to go to these store openings, they demand pictures. Usually, if I want to keep the clothes, I don't mind. But something like this? You stay out too late, you look like a prostitute.
Tch-tch-tch
.” She spoke without moving her lips like she was used to having a cigarette rammed in the corner of her mouth, and soon she was on the hunt through a basket of needles and thread for a pack of Parliaments.

“If this isn't a good time,” he said, “I can come back tomorrow.”

“No, you stay. I'm sorry. You want to talk about your poor sister, and I'm dressed for a party. You see, I forget that I promised. They make me go to these things. They say it is good for my career. Please forgive me.” She ran over to clench his hands. Seeing that he wasn't offended, that, in fact, he was thankful for the five minutes she agreed to spend talking about the accident to a total stranger, she exposed her mangled teeth again. Her gums were purple, and no doubt in some other planet ruled on the precepts of dentistry she would have been considered one of the ugliest members of her tribe. In this world, she was one of the most attractive.

“I hope you don't mind my saying, but you look familiar.” Raj couldn't shake the sense that he was somehow supposed to know her by sight.

She sat across the table from him on an even more precarious chair. She struck a match and then puffed smoke, much of it escaping around the cigarette.

“Do I?” she replied more in defiance than in doubt. “I came to New York a year ago to get away from that kind of question. I came here to belong to nobody, to work on my music. But New York is not far enough away. There's never getting away from your parents, is there? Not mine anyway. You know who they are and probably see their faces in me. That's why I look familiar to you.” Cecile's
self-absorption was rather charming in its humility at being bested by the generation before her own. “My mother is Laura Allen.” No explanation needed, her mother was the British model, muse, and silent actress in speaking '70s movies, who, when her face turned thirty, moved to Paris to marry the city's notorious French musician. “Sebastian Dozol. That's my father. So now we know who I am. Now we know the reason for this dress and why the guitar lies on the table and no one ever asks me to play it. Who wants to hear a song by the daughter of so and so? It's too bad because I'm quite good.” She sighed cigarette fumes. “Now who are you?”

“Raj Singh,” he said, appreciating the lack of glamour that followed his name in echoes around the loft. What a prison to have the ghosts of your parents pursuing you around the globe, to have them always a step ahead of you, breezing into rooms just before you entered, the holy cynosures to which you are only the insufficient ambassador. Suddenly, he felt less inadequate in his cheap dress shoes and unironed shirt. How freeing to be Raj Singh of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where even Ft. Lauderdale would collectively ask
who?
“I take pictures but not the kind that you're used to.”

“You see,” she squealed in laughter. “Isn't it nice to have to explain? I don't mean to complain. I think maybe it will be okay for my son. By the time he's older, people won't remember who his grandparents were.”

“You have a kid?” Raj asked in genuine surprise. He figured that Cecile couldn't be more than twenty-five.

“Yes, he's four.” Cecile reached for the guitar, and immediately Raj worried he would have to sit through a tender ballad devoted to the child. Instead she pulled out a photograph that was woven in the strings. “Seb,” she said, holding up a shot of a blank-faced boy with long, girlish hair and breadcrumbs dotting his mouth. “He's with his father in Paris. We are no longer together.
Mon destin est des mauvais hommes
.”

“If you wanted to break him from the family, you shouldn't have named him after your father.”

“Very smart,” Cecile replied, shaking her fist with her fingers hooked to let the cigarette do the exclamatory pointing. “But even a rebellious girl at eighteen knows to watch out for her son's future.”
She paused, digging her fingernail into a skull that was carved into the grain of the table. “I do love my family,” she avowed, as if Raj had been the one to suggest otherwise.

“Cecile, I wanted to ask you about the picture you took. The one that you turned in to the police.”

“I know.” She returned her son to the guitar strings and leaned back in her seat. “I haven't been able to get it out of my mind.”

“You saw what happened.”

“I was going to talk to my agent that afternoon,” she said, shutting her eyes briefly to reveal two painted black lids. “His office is down there. I had just done some shopping. I was looking at magazines in one of those outdoor stalls. I had posed for a spread in a fashion magazine, the kind where they ask you to take off your clothes and then they don't tell you if you will find yourself completely naked two months later in every bookstore.”

“You saw the accident?”

“No.” She threaded her fingers through her hair and brought her elbows to rest on the table. “I didn't see it. I heard it. It was a sound I cannot describe. Like being in a basement, in the quietest place. And a heavy box is dropped, and the walls are filled with that sound. Like the vibration takes over the entire space, and you can feel it in your fingertips. I remember when I heard it I looked up. I dropped the magazine and stepped back. It had been raining, and it was hard to see clearly because everything was glowing wet. I noticed something lying in the street. I don't know why, but I had my phone in my hand and my first instinct was to take a picture. I don't want you to think I'm one of those people whose first response to something atrocious is to photograph it.”

“I don't think that,” he said to reassure her.

“Only when I looked at the screen could I see that it was a woman lying in the street and she had been injured. Only on the screen did it make sense that it was a person.”

“But you got the car too,” he reminded her, speeding up her story so she would no longer retreat into unnecessary incidentals. He wanted her facts, straight and undecorated. His patience was starting to run thin.

“I didn't notice that until I looked up again. It was going the wrong way. A blue car, it was, but far down the block. It slowed and then sped up. I tried to take another picture, because now I understood. This woman had been hit. But by the time I raised my phone the car had rounded the corner. Gone.”

“Do you remember anything more about the car? Any details, the make of it, or the license plate?”

“No.” She shook her head and closed her eyes as if to return to the scene. “No.
Tout homme est coupable de tout le bien qu'il n'a pas fait.
I told the police everything I saw.” She suddenly opened her eyes as if horrified that he didn't believe her, as if she had just realized that this afternoon visit had turned inexplicably into an interrogation. “Please believe me. I would have told them if I knew more. I did not know what it was until it was too late.”