Strangers at the Feast (18 page)

They enjoyed three wonderful years in that apartment until she was pregnant with Ginny. By 1973, stories about stagflation and unemployment filled the papers. Wooden planks sealed the entrances of their neighborhood music shops and groceries. Graffiti covered bus stops and storefronts, the sidewalks cracked and crumbled, and one day Eleanor nearly sprained her ankle on a loose chunk of pavement.
The paths of Central Park were strewn with litter, and in the dark underpasses, where she and Douglas had once gleefully listened to their voices echo, men kicked at empty cans and glared menacingly at her swollen belly.

Someone forgot to keep her legs crossed.

Police sirens wailed through the night, punctuated here and there by shattering glass. Remembering how Kitty Genovese had been stabbed to death on the street while more than thirty people listened and watched, Eleanor hugged the phone close. Twice, she called the police: “I heard
something
. No, I don’t know exactly where. But you must send help.”

Gavin was lost in the loud machinery of his snoring, leaving Eleanor to get out of bed and ensure the windows and doors were locked. Unable to get back to sleep, she brought Douglas to nestle beside her on the sofa.

“We’re safe, sweet pea,” she whispered as her heart raced.

During the day, she stayed home except for essential errands. With Douglas propped beside her she sat staring at the television news: robberies and shootings and arson; an old woman raped near a grocery store. Eleanor covered his eyes.

People, the newscaster said, were fleeing to the suburbs. Apartment landlords offered three months rent-free to anyone who would brave a lease. Co-ops threw mink coats at potential buyers.

“The Zackners down the hall have gone to Katonah,” she told Gavin, “and remember the Connors? Sally and Kevin? Just last week she called to give us their new address. In New Hampshire!”

“Good. He’s a pompous ass.”

“At least Harold Zackner managed to get his family out.”

“You make it sound as if they escaped Nazi-occupied Poland, Ellie. This is the Big Apple. I walk to and from the office every day.”

“And come home at bedtime, practically. I sit here, worrying.”

After Vietnam, it seemed only a full-fledged war would scare him.
Gavin said historically economies expanded and receded; that this was a brief slump, a phase, and the city would soon snap back. He wanted to take advantage of the discounts in rent.

“This is no time to be frugal!” she said. “Your son has a twitch.”

“What?”

“He’s doing this thing with his face where he scrunches it up every few minutes. Dr. Robison said it’s the nerves.”

“What does a two-year-old have to be nervous about?”

“Boarded-up storefronts! Young black men sitting on stoops! Everything is waiting to explode! I can’t sleep because I’m too frightened of someone coming in the window.” She clutched her belly. “My children can’t live like this. This is a sinking ship, Gavin. Women and children must come first!”

“Ellie, suburb equals house, house equals mortgage. We’re coming up on kid number two. You don’t want me working long hours, but you want to add a train commute? The draft is over and all those MBAs are about to pour into the job market. I’m trying like hell to get out of this dead-end insurance job and into management so I can have some sliver of hope of finding a better job, then maybe doing something with my life. How the hell do I do that if I have to spend an extra three hours a day on sales calls so my commission will pay off a house?”

“Well, we certainly won’t need a house when we’re dead.”

Eleanor had seen a news special about how citizens could protect themselves. She bought two cans of Mace and a pearl-handled pistol and, with five other women, spent Tuesday afternoons in Brooklyn firing at pictures of hooded men, learning to ignore the kickback. She was the best in the class and at the end of the lessons, her instructor, a retired detective named Frank Brodie, gave Eleanor her targets. She folded the large perforated paper and tucked it into her underwear drawer. She walked everywhere with one hand on Douglas, the other on the pistol in her purse.

She considered asking Detective Brodie for a bullet casing from practice, and leaving it in their hallway for Gavin to find. How else could she make Gavin see they couldn’t stay? She was furious, but she still carried a vague guilt, a concern that Gavin suspected she had pinpricked her diaphragm.

She was afraid to do anything that would make Gavin feel tricked.

Only when the newspapers reported the city’s looming bankruptcy did Gavin wearily lay down his heavy briefcase and say, “You win, Ellie. Pick a suburb.”

What relief she felt as they drove their new station wagon to a white one-story colonial in Westport. The sight of manicured lawns and glistening sprinklers delighted her.

Eleanor spent her days watching the children and, while they napped, dusting the bookshelves and nightstands and mantel, scrubbing the floors, scouring the white porcelain tubs. At night, exhausted, she watched
The Waltons
and
All in the Family,
and waited for Gavin.

It was difficult to meet people, so each day she drove to the cool and brightly lit supermarket, where men in red aprons said smiling hellos. She liked to see what other women put into their shopping carts. She enjoyed the classical music that seemed to emanate from between the dewy cantaloupes.

In the spring, she crouched on the grass, raked the earth with her fingers, and planted flowers, tomatoes, and cucumbers, the loamy scent of soil soaking deep into her palms. By summer, her clay pots burst with geraniums and petunias, her vegetables glistened, and as she stood alone in her garden she tingled with pride.

Eventually, Eleanor found other young couples who had fled the city. In their living rooms they reached into crystal bowls of salted cashews, and between sips of scotch swapped stories of stolen cars and snatched purses.

Gavin left the room when these stories began, or he fell silent.

“Sweetheart, I wish you’d try to socialize a little bit more. We’re new in town and must try to make friends.”

“I’m on the phone selling nine hours a day. That’s enough meaningless chatter.”

“They’ll think you feel superior, that you find them boring. You yawned when Milton McCauley started talking about his work as a prosecutor.”

“How on earth would I feel superior?”

Gavin’s lack of enthusiasm for their new life concerned her. He seemed to her, even when they sat across the dining table and briefly locked eyes, like a man alone on a sailboat, a man whose return she was awaiting. She wondered if they had been too quick to move, wondered if the commotion of the city would have better distracted him from his unhappiness. Perhaps the city, as Gavin had said, would snap back.

But it did not snap back and this, in fact, worked tremendously to Gavin’s benefit. People were frightened and sales of home and car and life insurance skyrocketed. His phone rang off the hook. With his doubled commissions, they put money into the children’s college fund and built a small deck where they could set a table and grill. Those were delightful times: the long summer days when Ginny found a pet turtle in the yard, when Gavin built a tree house, when Douglas sold lemonade four Saturdays in a row to buy Eleanor new gardening gloves.

One night, after watching a late-July sunset with the children over a dinner of barbecue chicken, the smell of Eleanor’s mint and basil plants swirling in the warm breeze, Gavin and Eleanor settled into bed. As was their custom, they turned on the television and lay close, prepared to exchange opinions, before drifting off, on the various local news reports about animal-shelter spaying policies or proposed helmet laws.

But the screen flashed with apocalyptic images: smashed shopwindows,
policemen swinging billy clubs at shirtless men hugging radios, buildings engulfed in flames.

There was a blackout in New York City.

She hugged Gavin tightly, recoiled from the screen.

“You saved us. You got us out of there. And you are a much better man than Harold Zackner.”

KIJO

Kijo heard a thud and nearly elbowed over a vase as he swung around to find Spider. Another thud. Car doors.

Spider had already dashed for the window; he crouched low. “Thought you said they were occupied elsewhere,” he whispered.

“These people got cleaning ladies and stuff.”

“Cleaning on Thanksgiving?”

Kijo felt a sudden knot in his stomach; maybe he’d screwed up, got the address wrong, the times.

“What do you see?”

Kijo knew better than to go near the window; he’d knock the glass, or lean into sight.

“Just a Prius out there,” Spider said. “No one in it. I can’t see through these damned columns. Wait a second, hear that? Some lady sitting and talking to herself.”

“She’s not coming in?”

“You hear the front door?”

It was too early, thought Kijo. They couldn’t be back. The wife had said they’d be gone all day. And just one woman out there? A whole family lived in this house. But he had a sense that something had been bumped; the vision he’d had of the day, the triumph he would feel walking out of that house, went foggy.

“When she leaves,” Kijo said, “we scram.”

“Kij, when’s that gonna be? Maybe she was looking for that key in
the planter. Maybe she’s calling someone right now, saying the key ain’t there. Let’s just walk out the door the way we came in.”

“The van’s too far.”

Spider flicked open his switchblade. He opened a dresser drawer and pulled out panty hose. He ripped them in half, and tugged one leg over his head.

Spider’s face looked flattened and scary. His lips looked like the lips of a man who’d been hit a hundred times. His hair was trapped like a tangle of worms. He looked like a man Kijo would run from in the night.

Spider handed him the other half of the panty hose. “You, too. Get ready.”

Then it was like gunfire—one, two, three car doors slamming.
Boom, boom, boom.

GAVIN

As Gavin stepped into the living room, the pain in his knee that had been mounting all morning finally struck him like a crowbar. He stopped in his tracks.

“Home, sweet home!” Douglas announced, gesturing the whole family toward two massive leather sectionals facing a flat-screen television.

Gavin braced his hand on the wall and made a show of examining a small touch pad that controlled music; he didn’t want to limp across the room. Didn’t want questions. He had found that if he could count to twenty, usually the worst of the pain would pass. He clenched his teeth, focused on the numbers,
6-7-8
, and eventually, one slow step at a time, he crossed the room and sank gratefully into one of the sectionals.

Heads of dear and elk hung overhead; a bearskin rug lay in front of the television. The room looked like a hunting lodge, though Douglas had never hunted. Douglas had explained to Gavin on his first visit that their decorator had suggested they do one room in “rustic lodge style.”

Gavin thought it odd that he had a daughter who wouldn’t eat animals and a son who hung dead ones on his wall.

Gavin had been a runner for most of his life, waking in the last hour of moonlight to experience the unparalleled calm of a long stretch of dark road. He had loved to feel his feet spurn the pavement as his body cut through the cold morning air. His heart racing, his
muscles thrumming, he watched the rising sun bring to life trees and mailboxes, parked cars and bright white houses, as though by sheer exertion he had willed the world into being.

Now, at age sixty, Gavin had to think hard about walking a block. Every day he awoke wondering if his knee was going to stab him with sharp pains or hammer him with a throbbing ache. He kept aspirin in his jacket pockets, swallowed them every few hours.

And this knee trouble had brought a new morbidity into Gavin’s thinking. As he showered in the morning, letting the water douse his body, he thought:
My body is failing
. The wrinkles, the graying hair, none of that had mattered to him. He found vanity silly. But his knee pain signaled to Gavin that the machinery of his being was breaking down, the nuts and bolts of his flesh coming loose. All those struggles—child rearing and mortgage payments, dumb flirtations and lost promotions—were suddenly supplanted by one basic realization: he was starting to die. It seemed now that there were only two truly terrifying events in a person’s life: dying, and understanding you were going to die. For some people, Gavin figured, the latter never happened, or it arrived so close to actual death that the two events became one. But Gavin now carried a certainty of his own death, and it scared him. Mostly it was the decay he feared, the body’s slow shutting down. The helplessness.

He’d also studied enough actuarial tables in his line of work to grasp another fact: his body would fail before his wife’s. All those years of trying to provide for Eleanor and she would eventually nurse him. He looked across the living room at her, jubilant in her maple leaf sweater, settling into the other leather sectional and reapplying her lipstick. She didn’t know what lay ahead. But he understood that for the long married, one spouse’s decrepitude became the other’s burden. At the thought of this indebtedness, Gavin’s throat tightened.

If he died swiftly, though, so much the worse. The idea of leaving his wife alone, and suddenly, disturbed him. Financially she would be fine;
he had a good policy with Reynolds and had saved responsibly for their later years. He made sure, from time to time, to show her the necessary file drawers and safety-deposit-box keys. But as much as Gavin had come to covet being alone, Eleanor loathed solitude. When he was gone, she would sit in the house… and do what? After all those years of waiting impatiently for him to return home at night, there would be no one to wait for. She would pick cucumbers and tomatoes from her garden, but she would no longer set them in the bib of her apron and stand smiling in the doorway; he wouldn’t walk up the front steps and say, “What you got there, salad gal?”