The Folded World Page 2

  She spun around. The red-bricked buildings crowded the narrow street on which she walked, snow covering the sidewalks. No, she was right, someone was calling out. A figure grew out of the evening gloom—a young man, running. By the time he reached her, his brow was damp with sweat; his head smoked in the cold. He bent over, breathing hard, hands on his knees. He held up one finger.

  “I ran—like five blocks—” He made a spooling motion with his hands, “—just to—”

  She looked down at him. “Where’s your coat?” she asked suddenly.

  Panting, the young man stood. He was only a hand taller than she, dressed in a sweater vest and a washer-thinned white collared shirt rolled above the elbows. His eyes glowed blue in the dusk. His mouth formed a small “o” as he looked at her, thinking.

  “I guess I—left it in the bar,” he said. Then he added quickly, “I don’t drink myself. I was at the bar with friends. Not that I have anything against people who drink. I just don’t myself. Drink. We go on Fridays. I like the peanuts. I eat the peanuts.”

  With that, he rolled his eyes and turned around. He appeared to be planning his retreat. His footprints remained in the fresh, thin snow. He bent to his knees again, laughing softly.

  “Stupid stupid stupid,” he muttered.

  Then he stood, grinning.

  “I’m out of practice.”

  “Out of practice what?” said Alice.

  “Asking out girls.” He smacked his hands together. “There, I said it.”

  Alice’s eyes widened. She lifted her hood back from her face. “I’m sorry. Who are you?”

  “I saw you through the window. Of the bar. I’ve seen you lots of times. Walking past. I’ve watched you. Not like a stalker! I’ve watched you out of interest. Like an anthropologist. No, not an anthropologist. Because after all, here I am, asking you out. But I’m not dangerous. I really never do this. And now I see why, too. Christ!” Charlie thrust out his hand. “My name is Charlie. I was born Charles of course, but that didn’t stick. It’s the ears.”

  She took his hand, and let go quickly. At the last moment, she remembered to speak, “My name is Alice Bussard.”

  She ran her tongue around her teeth. She should speak. She should speak. Almost shrilly, she said, “In this cold you shouldn’t be running around without a coat.”

  Then, averting her eyes, she blushed, for what raging shrew inside her had made her say such a thing? A wave of pity for him—that he had taken an interest in her—rose in her gut. But at that moment, the same or the next, watching the snow-dusted tips of his sneakers tapping, she hated this pity, and was sick of it, and looked up straight into his face. He was still there. He had not been sucked back into the blue dusky obscurity simply because his interest was implausible to her. Rather, he was rolling his shirtsleeves down and buttoning them at his wrists, murmuring in agreement, for it was cold.

  They stood for a moment, looking at one another.

  “Oh,” he said. “I have a question for you.”

  Alice narrowed her eyes. All around them, behind and underfoot, the snow softly quilted everything. His hair rustled; she could almost hear it. He crossed his arms.

  “So,” he said, “All these Happy Hours I’ve been wondering something about you. What are you afraid will happen? If you, you know, step on a crack?”

  She stared at him. She searched her mind for an instance in which she had revealed this to someone, anyone, even once. And then, heartily, she laughed.

  “Why are you laughing?” he asked.

  Shy, she ducked her chin to her chest. Our lies are so treasured, she thought. Would she be able to let this one go? This lie: that while walking down slushy streets to and away from a job she so disliked, motherless, fatherless, homeless, doubt-heavy, waiting as if in prison for a bud on a tree or some small genesis or sign, she had actually been godforsaken.

  Later, he stood in the middle of a busy sidewalk holding both her hands and looking down at his feet. Here he was, twenty-five years old and caught in the same unctuous pose as in a sixth-grade church-sponsored Virginia reel.

  “Quit laughing,” he said, trying to affect a teacherly expression, but the sight of her scrambled up his intentions and he laughed too, purely and shamelessly as a child.

  “I can’t do it,” she said. “It’s been too long.”

  “You can do it,” he said. “You must! Don’t be a slave to your misunderstandings. Or,” he frowned, “do you not renounce your belief that stepping on a crack will bring chaos and disaster or apocalypse or whatever the hell?”

  She drew back, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Her mitten dangled by a cord to the sleeve of her coat. He could see her back reflected in the department store window, her two white-stockinged legs and her hood.

  “Couldn’t we find a less crowded sidewalk?”

  He reached for her again. “Come on, now. Don’t be a puss.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “A puss?” She laughed, backing up against the plate glass window itself, people streaming in between them now, bearing briefcases and grocery bags. Behind her, in the window, mannequins posed in feminine solidarity.

  “What’s a puss?” she said. “You should come to Gloucester some time. We’ll teach you how to swear.”

  Charlie stepped toward her, into the foot traffic, jostled and swiped by shopping bags, feeling vaguely like a monster who had been trained for the circus. It occurred to him that sometimes a man’s very maleness made him like a monster who had been trained for the circus. You didn’t have to do a thing. All it took was a pretty girl to raise her eyebrows and repeat your words mockingly to you. He had known her only three weeks; she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever held in his arms. He had already kissed her once. He planned to do so again. As soon as he could get to her. He would not soon forget it. Kissing her, just on an ordinary street in the dark, he’d fallen unfathomably forward, into a space that had been wooing him in vain, it felt, for years. Afterward, he had walked home under a consummately quiet snowfall, and halfway back to his apartment he had actually begun to cry, looking at his hands that had so recently cupped her face, as if there might be bits of her beauty clinging to them like tissue.

  He cleared his throat, embarrassed before himself. He now stood pressed against the department store window too, looking down into the perfumed part of her hair.

  “So what do you believe will happen? I’d like to understand your superstition.” He tapped her head. “I want to seeee into your mind.”

  “And what would your seeing into my mind do for me?” she asked, looking up at him, her shoulder and part of her breast pressed against his black and red checkered wool coat. “Disaster will befall me. And then won’t you feel bad? It’s your experiment, you see, but my neck.”

  He swallowed. Her use of the word “neck” discomfited him. For there it was, the white road leading down into her dress.

  “Don’t you know anything?” she cried, almost giddy. “Don’t you know anything about bad luck?”

  “No,” Charlie said.

  When he kissed her this time, he caught her by surprise. He drew back. Her eyes, black and narrow, widened and became large as pools. He saw this, and he saw how her eyes engorged with the knowledge of him. She loves me, he thought. He did not understand why she loved him but he saw that it was true. The traffic light changed and a fresh crowd of pedestrians streamed around them. Blue dusk coated their skin.

  “Go ahead,” he whispered. “You can do it. Step here. This one right here.”

  Blushing, she looked away.

  “Listen. If the sky falls, I’ll catch it. I’ll hoist it back up. Whatever you think is going to happen, I’ll protect you.”

  “And my mother?”

  “Your mother?”

  “What about her back?”

  “Your mother’s back?” Charlie laughed. “Is that what you think? You think you’ll break your mother’s back? Like out of a nursery rhyme? Are you serious?”

  She smil
ed. “I’ll break it to pieces.”

  “You’re not serious,” he said. “You’re wasting my time. I am a serious, highly trained mental health care professional. And you’re just some flirt.”

  He pushed her gently away and swung himself around a nearby parking meter. He’d forgotten his gloves that day and his hands were red with windburn. She stood abandoned in the middle of the sidewalk, black hair melting over her shoulders.

  Out of her immediate physical presence, he almost felt like his old self again. He felt the flaps of his consciousness closing like a box. Maybe he did not want to fall in love. Maybe he regretted even getting this far. He would have his degree soon, and Banford had already secured for him a job at the best psychiatric hospital in the state, starting that summer. Charlie had gone several times to the ornate entrance of the building to practice going in and out of the revolving door. Many men with ambition were able to restrain themselves in love: they did not cry with happiness, they did not let themselves be trained for the circus. Charlie’s younger brother Mark had a prodigious sex life. One of his skiing pupils—a married woman, no less—had recently taken him for the weekend to Trieste. Trieste! A place so exotic it was in both Italy and Switzerland. Charlie shut his eyes and spun around the parking meter again, thinking maybe he did not want to fall in love with her, this Alice, this sloe-eyed, cheap-musk-wearing, hair-parted-down-the-side dentist’s receptionist, but even as he thought all this, he could still see her with some third lovesick eye, an eye inside him that, Charlie realized then, he could not shut.

  “Come here,” he said.

  She smiled, wandering over. She leaned against the cold metal post.

  “Don’t you have any superstitions?” she said. “Tell me you have no fears at all.”

  “A superstition isn’t a fear,” he said. “It’s a compulsion.”

  “It’s a fear, all right. It’s a fear of fate. A fear of the gods. They’re up there, you know. On Mount Olympus. Cruel, dangerously bored. They’re jealous of us mortals. Because they can’t love, and they can’t die. Imagine.” Her expression became sober. She looked at him. “Didn’t you know?”

  Charlie put both hands in his pockets and squinted up at the sky. It was beginning to snow. He felt the tight little kisses on his face. He wasn’t thinking about the gods. He was thinking that maybe there had never been a more beautiful winter night in New England or anywhere. He thought maybe he had never been happier. He could not remember a time. He was glad he could not shut the eye. He did not want to shut the eye. Because she made him want to be awake all night. She made him want to be like the moon, awake all night and watching. Perpetual.

  “No,” he said finally. “I’m not really afraid of anything.” He looked down at her and drew back her fur hood. “No,” he said again, the beauty of her face strengthening his conviction. “And I’ll protect you. I’ll protect you. I promise.”

  Alice looked down. There was a break in the traffic. She raised her boot, then placed it in the space between smooth concrete planes.

  “There you go,” he said. “Step on it like you mean it.”

  She laughed and let go of his arm. She covered her bare head with her mittens.

  “Sorry Ma!” she cried.

  He watched her, laughing and cringing, victorious and clumsy, her stocking legs and boots peaking out from her big coat.

  Alice, he whispered. It’s you.

  Of course, falling in love is still a falling. Though the sensation of falling might be pleasurable to the body, it is distressing to the mind. The body falls in love easily, whorishly, but then the mind comes loping behind everything, trying to make orders, blowing its shrill whistle.

  As soon as she knew she loved him, she became afraid. She was not afraid she would stop loving him. She was afraid that he would be rescinded somehow. She did not know by what or whom. Lying naked on her twin bed in her apartment with the shadows of the plants passing on the wall, she stroked his head on her stomach. Her breath smelled of sex and black pepper, and she felt ruinously beautiful, her breasts tilted apart in the moonlight, the sheets threaded through her legs. Trying not to wake him, she pulled a cigarette down from the pack by the windowsill. She had taken up smoking, out of nowhere, and enjoyed it very much. It was the only thing she had chosen to do entirely by herself except move to the city and turn around when he called her name. A cinder fell from the tip and landed with a pinch on her skin before turning to ash. Who would take him from her, she wondered? What in the world was she afraid of? Had he not liberated her from those awful, burdensome working-class superstitions when he proved her wrong about cracks? Besides, she was not special enough to be in danger. She was an anonymous girl, a receptionist from Gloucester, who had never even gone to college. A bookworm, fatherless, and fond of funnel cakes.

  Gloucester. Why should she think of Gloucester now, with Charlie Shade (bringer of springtime! shower librettist! thief of the landlady’s Tribune!) sleeping possessively across her, his fine hair in his eyes, his fingers moving in his dreams? Against her will, she thought of the rows of pink and white and pistachio green tenements of Gloucester and the lack of grass and roller skates that you clamped to your shoes with a key, and men and women so old and tradition-bound that they actually hoped for another war so that they’d have to stand in butter lines again. She thought of the poor children playing outside after they’d all received their summer haircuts, the slate gray sea in the distance behind them. She thought of her mother closing the curtain and saying God save us. Alice remembered, quite vividly, her mother rolling her eyes about the poor children and their yearly summer haircuts. It was a joke. Her mother did not believe in God, so no one would be saving anybody. God would save, least of all, the grubby little children of East Gloucester. There was no meritocracy (according to Marlene) and no God, and a person could be happier if (according to Marlene) he accepted how alone he really was, alone in an oarless dingy, lost at sea. Thusly, there was liberation—in hopelessness. Thusly night fell on Gloucester and on all the bones in the ocean, and there was Alice and her mother, stuck in a tall clapboard house oarlessly instead of in Europe where they kept the Charles Bridge. Alice often thought of this trip to Europe as the worst thing that ever happened to her mother. She wished she could reverse time and spare her mother from having to see something as beautiful as the Charles Bridge in the rain.

  She laughed. Charlie’s head jiggled on her belly. He wiped his mouth and fell back to sleep. But what did it matter? Why should she think of Gloucester now, and of her mother? The paper at the end of the cigarette crackled.

  “Wake up, Charlie,” she whispered, “you damned innocent fool.”

  He turned his head on her belly, murmured, and did not wake.

  Why, she thought, when one is in love, does one feel least at peace? How is it that love casts damning knowledge backward upon one’s lonely life? How lonely I used to be. How lonely carrying my books across the glass-shattered streets. How bored I was being scolded by employers, how bored going to the movies with Claudette and comparing those movies to previous movies, how bored watching holiday decorations change in shop windows, bored seeing the neighborhood children grow up—another year, another haircut. Why had life wished me to languish in this way?

  Apocalyptically, she now had nothing to go back to. In her heart, Gloucester was a boarded-up ghost town. She dropped her cigarette in an empty sardine tin on the windowsill where it landed with a pfst. Charlie stirred.

  “No,” she whispered. “Never mind. Be a fool. Keep sleeping.”

  She drew his head closer on her bosom. How could she be hopeless now? How could she be free? For she had, in her possession, an oar.

  She was suddenly possessed of a radical awareness of a god. Not God of St. Catherine’s School on Quenton Avenue but a God who saw things as she did, as knowingly and as darkly—a God who was no longer in charge but was still politely consulted on hard cases.

  Please, she whispered in the darkness. Please.

&n
bsp; Leave us alone. Leave us just like this.

  The little claw-footed grandmother drifted through the crowd in the auditorium. She was too short to see around anyone, so she had to trust the backside of her son-in-law. Glen Shade himself seemed a bit lost, his trademark ears panning back and forth like satellite dishes.

  “Where do we sit?” the grandmother cried. “Did he order a seat for us, or what?”

  Her daughter turned around and took the old woman’s hand. A silk knot at her throat, her hair in butter cream waves, Luduina did not look as if she had just traveled halfway across the country at 500 miles per hour. The grandmother was much comforted by her daughter’s ordered hair and appearance. As she got older and more shrunken, the grandmother often felt like a child, and therefore was comforted easily like a child. She wandered trustfully behind them into a vast hall.

  “That’s her,” she said, pointing to a dark-haired girl holding a program.

  Alice raised her hand and waved.

  Smiling, the Shades scooted down the aisle and past the legs of the people until they reached the empty seats beside the girl. They shook hands. It felt very natural and very pleasant to just sit there quietly and wait for Charlie to cross the stage in his robe and mortarboard. The grandmother, however, kept stealing peeks at Alice. Every time she looked up, through wrinkled gray eyes, she became more pleased. For secretly, she was glad that, upon shaking Alice’s hand, a clap of thunder had not rent the building in two and sent an iron girder down upon her.

  Throughout her life, the grandmother had been plagued by premonitions. She’d had her first one, dreadful as the onset of menses, at age thirteen, regarding the collision of her favorite uncle’s car with a cement truck. This collision had come to pass as airily as the premonition. Sometimes the premonitions seemed mere inevitabilities; looking into the eyes of her high school sweetheart she had felt his wartime fate as clearly as he had. But her visions were awash with perfect detail. They came with a taste in the mouth, with breezes from their own world. She had never been wrong, only once inaccurate, believing it was her classmate’s sister who would disappear one day behind the school, never to be found, when it was the boy himself who was lost, infamously, a boy with a touch (when he passed backward her tablet from the teacher) soft as twice-sifted flour. She had spent days in bed afterward, ill, thinking of him, and what she might have done to prevent it. She was too old now for the costs. Yet she was plagued. She wondered which devil-marked trail had led her into this secret life. She was a Presbyterian, after all. She desired neither to be visionary nor to have highly sought-after information. But there they were anyway—stark, vivid, rippling visions of the future.