Widow's Dozen. Marek Waldorf
on the consignment, but of course that was impossible. Fenwick put out a hand and Russell didn’t hesitate, he passed along the slip of paper as one would a ticket to a nearby Broadway show, and through Fenwick’s eyes he read—recomposing with barely a glance the impossible words, while watching the light which surpasseth understanding break, burrow down and dissolve into this intensification of painful enlightenment pictured in front of him—BEHOLD YOURSELF! “Remote viewing,” he said. “Sure,” said Fenwick, without batting an eyelid, “we’re all over that.” He tucked the ticket away in his briefcase. And at first it was like boric or hyperbolic acid, the vision burned his fragile idiom that bad. It seared the wonder in the flesh dissolving there in front of him, and it was his, all his. Fenwick wouldn’t shut his eyes. Or was it all in innocent fun? Russell’s only other choice was to take the shades off, but knowing it was that simple was the hook. But what was he looking out at, eyes filled with this odious but unarguably genuine empathy? The memory that worked on him and worked on him, to this day. The little pippin. The hypogriffin of seven years’ disaster. In his candy-cane-colored outfit, he was making all kinds of surprising faces, trying to win back his child.
“Uncle Russ,” Max had said, “you’re silly.”
“But of course I am,” said Russell. “All grown-ups are fundamentally silly.”
“But why?”
“Because,” said Russell, “think about it. There are really only two ways to be an adult. Silly. And scary. It comes about through our genes.” But wasn’t there the man of sorrows as well? Mortal after all. He saw the face tackle his memory. Russell took off the shades and rubbed his eyes. He rubbed for a long time, reluctant to open them. When he did, Fenwick was gone, but the glasses were still in his hands. The sudden emptiness of the plaza, augmented by the many chairs casually arranged around the slablike tables, but, in fact, riveted in. At the back, a curtain of water fell stiffly down the front of a distressed metal tablet. Quick claques of pedestrians, tourists and suits, walked past on the sidewalk, but nobody turned in. In the break between sides, cars streamed and stopped. Local and entertainment news on the minute wrote itself across the red news tape banners, across wall-eyed windows opening onto snapped-together cubicles, with the different speaker systems disposed of—camouflaged—around the plaza.
The music deferred to the vacuousness of their physical attainments, while also secreting something familiar. Russell knew it. He had heard the original version thousands of times, but couldn’t remember the name. Not the name, but for reasons impossible to fathom the lyrics did come back to him. The people were passing faster than the cars, as a rule, and there were more of them, and they seemed more diffident and fragmentary as a result. Clips of color, of material yearning. For well you know that it’s a fool (he remembered) who plays it cool by making his world a little colder. And all the words returned, right up until the chorus.
Meanwhile, Fenwick’s speeding south on Fifth, feeling pleased with himself. More than a little. What a stroke! Luck like that is like winter lightning—but what about his technique? He’d been very in the moment. Twice this guy had almost wriggled free, but he’d reeled the fish back onto the sidewalk. It’s so rare to run into a presenting type that you imagine they’ve all but ceased to exist—the Napoleons, the Christs, the Lincolns, Washingtons, Kennedys and supporting presidents, the prophets, martyred saints and holiday enunciations. He, Fenwick, believes himself to be an original. His walk certainly is—ditto his glide, angling sideways with one shoulder, with the arms coddled loosely, not swinging back and forth too much. The pace is brisk but conveys no actual hurry. His wending is a private-in-company performance, but he devises his way between clients and potential customers—who are keeping reasonably clear of him—while also avoiding the man- and weather-made cracks in the sidewalk. In fact, he is making all kinds of minor metaphysical calculations as he passes different pairs of eyes, eyes connecting with his or not. He keeps pace with these early impressions, it’s easy, the UES thoroughbreds on top of Gramercy winsomes, cracker pontoons, wasp-waisted naifs, Japanese jokers and the more durable European duos so undeniable in their eager fashion nativities, corkscrewed after or plaited arm in arm like the boroughs that collide—but more naively outwards. But they step into his path and on behind, quarreling sports with their peers, while beside him angry workers circle an enormous inflated rat, both claws extending palms-down, as if to be slapped. An intricate nest of buttoned-up white collars. But the intricacy lies in how they slowly circulate around one another, taradiddle, square-dance style, using oncomers as moving bales of hay. It fascinates! Between beheadings—a blur of rapidly vibrating thumbs—some kids swap Texas instruments. This man’s face narrows to a knife-edge while the wings of the moustache work outward like a vise. The competitive beauty of an almond-eyed office assistant, her slick hair brown but suggesting red. The veteran collecting small bills behind the cardboard sign that keeps him and his companion in misery, a brute shepherd mix, hungry, scatters his blessings indiscriminately, whether others provide or not. But who’s really at fault here? Is “society” standing in his way? Hardly. There’s something pleasant to look at in everybody, Fenwick finds—he gets a tiny sexual charge from every last one of them. But he gives back even more. What a job! He puts his mouth to an ear and blows. A few temporarily disintegrate, but not Fenwick—nor upon him—who deftly skirts the supplicating cap. But then he nearly loses himself, just as the sunlight loses heed behind the office towers, siphoned across avenues, down rundown chasms, first between Orthodox Jews in dark winter jackets and then between a Con Ed crew wrestling with cones, bibs and orange helmets, decked-out ministers of old Broadway vaudeville beside shock-haired deliverers and middle-aged PAs, location men, a white rasta with primped yellow dreads, gaffers, presumptuous Latin teenagers, lumpen Isises warily noted by Hoboken bluebeards in suede trenchcoats gleaming with close-of-day moisture, a coffee-carrying woman hurrying forward in a business suit and black tights as the sunlight forks along the cross-streets of the low forties, a swaggering subaltern in pink pinstripe, executive wool skirts, a couple of leg-warmers, knitters, tall and short—the scarf reaches down to her waist—and all of them, all, every last one, is talking to him- or herself. They are fashionable, glitzy, greedy, and hairy, but they are sublime as well. They call up the voices of friends cut off from them forever but surviving in the ether that surrounds Manhattan. “Insha’Allah.” “Gotcha, man. Gotcha.” “. . . but that wasn’t the extraordinary thing. The extraordinary thing . . .” Fenwick flips it around. And when he’s done with the friction of minutely loving these people—loving them for who they appear to be, not are, for the typological questions they pose, with their wonderful suggestions of intricacy—he finds he has arrived at the preening lens of the times that is Times Square. Here the giants and saints of this world compete for Russell’s attention—who, from his perch ten corners back, is peering through those discombobulating glasses. But now he is able to see as Fenwick sees them, as funny adjectives that hope just keeps stringing along. Circulating. So many but all communicating to themselves. But the thing is you didn’t worry! Because the best cure for hope there is is laughter. It rolls up out of his belly and spills out of a pure spring tapped from the source, an enormous surcharge, out over the intersection—but actually funny. Santa’s new laugh is terrific. Focused and infectious. People stop and smile at him, but it’s a good smile. They are curious and engaged, all but prepared to fit themselves into his unkillable good cheer. As laughter goes, it’s hearty but far from seeming deranged. It binges on that last shot of sunlight scraping down the aisles. It obeys the worn-out brightness of that moment, and the theatrical bills of Mid-town. But here. Now.
1
I started seeing her. On a Wednesday, Ash Wednesday in fact. For a nonbeliever, the sight of all those foreheads smudged with crosses materializing and vanishing inside a crowd of well-heeled strangers brought a charge that was immodest, esoteric, serene. Not one: we are none of us as unique as we like to think.
2
She was bringing two beers from the counter back to our table when she knocked over a stool and spilled onto some woman’s new leather jacket.