The City When It Rains

CHAPTER

TWENTY-NINE

“I THINK it’s still in here,” Maitland said as he opened the door to his office.

Corman followed him inside then stood silently while Maitland felt about for the light switch, his fingers clawing at the wall until he finally located it.

“There,” Maitland said as the fluorescent bulbs fluttered for a moment, then grew bright. He swept his arm out. “Looks the same, doesn’t it?”

Corman nodded, took another step into the room and stared about, his hand unconsciously fingering the latch on his camera bag. The room looked almost exactly as it had that afternoon ten years ago when he’d sat in the plain wooden chair in front of Maitland’s desk and told him he was leaving Columbia.

“Same bust of Poe,” Maitland said. “Only a little yellower. Same diplomas hanging from the wall.”

Corman glanced toward the diplomas, his mind instantly turning to the one they’d found in the burn-out, its cracked glass and shattered frame.

Maitland walked to the large metal filing cabinet at the other end of the room. “The paper should be in here somewhere,” he said as he pulled open the third drawer and glanced down at a stack of undergraduate papers. “In twenty years of teaching, these are the only ones I’ve kept.” He stepped back from the file cabinet. “Sorry I can’t stay,” he added. “Just close the office door when you leave.”

Corman waited until he could no longer hear Maitland’s footfall in the corridor before he began going through the papers. Sarah’s was near the bottom of the stack.

It was very short, only a page and a half of tightly knotted sentences. As a paper, it hardly existed at all. Instead, it was a gathering of sentences, often disconnected, as if Sarah’s mind had been incapable by then of stringing thoughts together in a coherent pattern. Fragmented, often broken off before completion, they suggested a mind that had simply shattered into thousands of tiny shards, like a large crystal vase that had fallen from a great height. It was still possible to catch individual, shining pieces, perhaps even to sense the overall beauty they must have once joined to create. But the whole had clearly flown apart. It was as if the law of gravity had ceased to operate in her mind, so that everything rose, sank and drifted according to weights and measures which were no longer assigned and limited by anything outside them. Because of that, as he read her paper again and again, Corman found himself ensnared in a similar randomness and indecipherability, so that the very act of thinking back over what he’d read drew him into Sarah’s own swirling state, filled his mind with the wild, whirling sparkle of uprooted, weightless things.

And yet, she was there, clearly and powerfully, a voice so lost, and yet so entirely distinct, that her death suddenly came to him as something personal for the first time. He thought of her by the window, her mind shooting through the darkness that surrounded her, a vast sea of flickering lights, red, blue and yellow, burning in her head, burning in the darkness behind her and which, perhaps, she had finally tried to escape by easing herself to the ground on a cool white stream of rain.

He read the paper a final time before returning it to Maitland’s file drawer, then headed toward the subway.

Outside, he could still feel her around him as he scuttled along the wet bricks of Columbia Walk, then took a train to the Village. It was as if she’d entered Maitland’s office while he read and wrapped him in the texture of her anguish. Sentence by sentence, the web of her tiny black script had coiled around him, her words lined up like figures before a firing squad as she struggled madly for some bizarre frozen purity before letting it all fizzle away in long blank spaces and end finally in the coup de grace of an uncompleted sentence: “Given the note/tone/mood of excresence here we may/can/will only/inadequately say/declare that it is/composed/authenticated/ with the heart of a …”

He got off the train at 14th Street and headed east, still thinking of her, rooted in her, his eyes hardly taking in the legions of street-peddlers who spread their rain-soaked merchandise along the whole desolate strip that led to the river.

He could see Joanna already waiting for him as he stopped at the corner of First Avenue. She was sitting near the restaurant’s front window, the table she always preferred, her eyes watching the flow of traffic as it moved southward toward the Bowery. As he watched her from across the street she looked hazy, incorporeal, an artist’s sketch of a human being he’d decided not to paint. For a moment, Corman stood in the rain, watching her as she sipped her margarita casually, fingering the rim of the glass as she always did. He thought of taking a picture of her as she sat in the window, then decided it would seem posed, Joanna only a model who took direction well.

Her eyes drew over to him when he came through the door.

“Hi,” Corman said quietly, as he stepped up to the table.

Joanna smiled. Her eyes misted. “Leo’s going to be okay,” she said, her voice breaking slightly.

Corman nodded, bent forward and kissed her, then started to move away.

She held on to him, her arms squeezing tightly around his body as he continued to stand over her. “Benign, that’s what they said,” she told him. “Completely benign. Like a wart, no worse than that, only inside.”

Corman sat down opposite her and took her hands in his. For an instant, he saw Sarah’s face float up from just beneath Joanna’s, disappear, then return in a faint, wavering image that swam in and out of his vision.

“I knew you’d be happy about it,” Joanna said. She daubed her eyes. “Sorry, sorry.” She drew the handkerchief from her eyes. “You’ve never seen me cry before, have you?”

Corman gazed at her. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Yeah, that’s part of it, I guess,” Joanna said. She hesitated a moment. “You don’t know all that’s been going through my mind, Corman. What happens is, you lose control. You can think anything.” She took out a cigarette and lit it shakily. “I asked myself all kinds of questions,” she said. “Things about Leo. And about us, too.” She squeezed his hand. “Especially, you know, in a situation like this. I thought maybe I’d been bad for Leo all these years. Bad for his life, I mean.” Her eyes grew very serious. “You can take a lot of things, Corman, but you never want to think that anybody would have been better off if they’d never met you.”

Her fingers were still in his, but he could feel himself releasing them one by one, small dry reeds he was feeding to the fire.

“I mean, nobody should give somebody else that much grief, right?” Joanna said.

He allowed the last finger to slip from his grasp.

“I even thought maybe I was bad for you,” she added.

He drew back slightly and lowered his hands into his lap.

“You don’t always know how things will end,” she said.

“You never do,” Corman said quietly.

Joanna put out the cigarette, lit another and laughed nervously. “I always wondered why you weren’t involved with a younger woman,” she said.

Corman shrugged.

“No, really.”

Corman shook his head. “I don’t see the point of talking about it.”

Joanna glanced away from him, fingering the salted rim of her margarita. “I guess not,” she said. “Anyway, I’ve been doing some thinking. I really have.” Her face tensed. “David, I’m going to stay with Leo from now on. That’s what I’ve decided.” She paused a moment, drew in a second deep breath. “Just Leo.”

In his mind Corman saw her curled in Leo’s naked arms, snoozing beside him in their bed, living in the tightly sealed jar of predictability and taking comfort in knowing with absolute certainty how it would finally end.

“Did you hear me?” Joanna asked.

“Yes.”

“It’s what works,” Joanna told him curtly. She waited for him to answer, then added, “Doesn’t it?”

Corman didn’t answer.

Joanna crushed out another cigarette. “But not for me, is that what you mean?” she asked with a sudden sharpness. “That look you just gave me.”

“I don’t know what works for you.”

“No, I guess not,” Joanna said brittlely, then waved her hand. “Forget it, Corman.”

Suddenly, he realized she would be easy to forget since nothing of any real importance had ever happened between them. He felt closer to Sarah Rosen, had seen her more utterly revealed.

Joanna’s eyes bore into him. “You have to make accommodations, don’t you?” she asked. “You just can’t live as if there’s no tomorrow.”

Corman stared at her silently.

“You were my hedge against being bored,” Joanna told him matter-of-factly. “That’s what it all comes down to.” She reached for another cigarette, then stopped herself. “You can’t have everything. Only a kid believes that.” She waited for him to say something and continued when he didn’t. “I wanted it all. That’s always been my problem. I wanted Leo at home with the laundry. Good, steady Leo. But I also wanted someone waiting for me in a little restaurant or a hotel room. You, or someone like you.” She looked at him as if she were making a final confession. “I’ve always had a lover. Long before you, Corman. Always.” She drew in a deep, determined breath. “But I’m giving all that up now. Completely giving it up.”

Corman leaned forward slightly and fought to keep his attention on her. But she already seemed very small and far away, made of gauze or flash paper.

“It’s what I’ve decided, that’s all,” Joanna said firmly. “I just wanted to let you know.” Then she reached toward him and touched his face gently. “My last lover,” she whispered.

He hardly felt her hand, and let his eyes drift toward the street.

Joanna seemed to sense the distance that already divided them. She looked at him closely. “David? Are you all right?”

He turned back toward her, but saw Sarah’s face again instead, all her agony building within him.

“David?” Joanna repeated.

His lips parted wordlessly.

Joanna’s eyes hardened. “You don’t care, do you? That I’m leaving. You’re not even thinking about it.”

Corman didn’t answer.

“You’re thinking about something else,” Joanna said. “Your own thing.” She glared at him fiercely, then began gathering her things, snapping up her cigarettes and lighter and dropping them angrily into her purse. “You turn everything into something else,” she said hotly. “Some big fucking deal. In your head. A federal case.”

She stopped for a moment and gave him an icy stare. “You know something? I never felt you were really with me. Even in bed—somewhere else.” She jerked herself to her feet. “I’m getting out of here.”

He didn’t try to stop her, and in an instant she was gone, the sound of her high-heeled shoes clicking first along the tile floor, then beyond the door and out into the street.

For a long time after she’d left, Corman continued to sit in place, his eyes concentrating first on her empty glass, then his own hands, finally settling on the few dark figures who sat here and there in the shadowy light at the back of the restaurant. In photographs, each one would look dramatically alone, an isolated shape in a shroud of faded light. Inevitably, he knew, a grim futility would gather in every frame, and because of that, he tried to imagine a way to show each figure differently—to compose, once and for all, a picture that could say what is without declaring that it had to be.