The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

1999: The Middle

AT THE SQUEAK of Tooly’s sneaker, the man on the floor sat upright and torqued around, staring at her.

“You okay?” she asked.

He leaped to his feet, stumbling over bags of groceries on the parquet around him. He was in his early twenties, brilliant black hair, paper-white skin, blood-flushed cheeks. “I’m fine,” he replied. “Fine. Please, could you close my front door, please?”

She did so, reverting to the solitude of the building hallway, twirling away. She passed other closed apartment doors, considering each — then glanced back. His keys still dangled in the lock. She returned and silently removed them.

Could take these to use another time. But better to be invited in right now. She knocked.

He opened immediately — must’ve been at the peephole — and scanned her. Tooly’s wardrobe was striking for its mismatches: a red duffle coat over an oatmeal cable knit and lime bell-bottom corduroys, all smelling of mothballs (their previous lodgings having been racks at a Salvation Army thrift store in Long Island City, Queens). Beneath these layers was a figure consisting of bony sections and soft sections, not necessarily ordered according to the preferences of fashion. Her shoes were Converse low-tops — one red, one black — and, hidden under her corduroys, she wore men’s thermal socks up to her knees. Her face was bright, as if just splashed with water, freckles on the bridge of her nose, and she wore no makeup, never having learned its correct application. Indeed, she forgot to consult a mirror most mornings, encountering the world in a state of discomposition until she glimpsed her reflection somewhere, shivering with amusement, then catching the tips of the brambly bob cut between her lips and chewing. A damp strand adhered to her cheek now.

She flicked it away and smiled. “You left your keys in the door.”

He took them, nodding in thanks. “I’m an idiot.”

She made no move to leave.

“Thanks,” he said hesitantly, beginning to close the door.

“One second,” she said. “Just that — sorry if I intruded. Just — this is a bit weird. But I used to live here, actually.”

“How do you mean?”

“I grew up in this apartment. Haven’t been back to New York in years, but I was walking by the building and … Is it insane if I ask to peek in? Tell me if it’s insane. I’m getting a flood of memories just standing here.”

“Place is a bit of a mess right now.”

“In that case, I’ll feel right at home.”

He began to object but gave in, and took a step back, nearly losing his footing on the abundance of Chinese delivery menus scattered on the floor. They exchanged names, shook hands awkwardly.

The building belonged to Columbia University, which rented out apartment shares like this to its students. Yet, of the three men residing here, only one actually attended Columbia. Duncan himself studied law—“But not here,” he said confusingly, leading her past the first bedroom, rented out by an MBA student named Xavi (pronounced “Savvy”), who was currently at class. The other roommate, Emerson, was also away, attending a literary-theory seminar.

Duncan nodded dismissively toward the bathroom, but she went right in for a look. Its filth affirmed this as the domain of young heterosexual males: a dirty basin surrounded by empty gel jars and cardboard toilet rolls; pubic hairs and dried urine on the rim of the open toilet; a mildewed shower curtain concealing a grimy tub. “I did clean that once,” Duncan noted, almost with surprise.

“How come?”

“I needed to use it. The doctor told me to.”

“The doctor told you to take a bath?”

“For my nose.”

“Couldn’t you wash your nose in the basin?”

“I …” He looked over, laughed shyly.

Each roommate had chores, but to clean was to surrender. “Emerson volunteered to do the floor once, which was pretty interesting. We didn’t see that one coming at all.”

Duncan led her to his room: dirty laundry bursting from the closet, glasses of bubbly old water, a laptop and modem beside legal casebooks. On a rickety stand was a Yamaha electric piano. The walls bore just one poster, depicting the countryside in Japan, where he’d taught English for a year.

She looked around the room. “Really brings back memories.”

“Sorry everything’s so chaotic.”

“Not at all,” she said. “I like squalid boy places.”

“In that case …” He led her to the kitchen, the sink heaped with dirty dishes and pans, oven clock blinking an eternal 12:00. One cupboard was filled with scrunched plastic bags, while another contained sinister jars of pickle juice and a packaged stew that had expired in 1998. “Normally, when girls come over they never come back.”

“Fools.” She drifted onward.

“Guess you know your way around,” he mumbled, following her into the living room, the dining table piled with junk mail for kids who’d long since graduated but had yet to inform the mass-mailing departments at Victoria’s Secret, Macy’s, and L.L.Bean. She raised the window—“I loved going out here”—and stepped onto the rickety fire escape, inadvertently flipping an ashtray there. Below were bare trees and parked cars, the potholed tarmac painted with XING SCHOOL.

“My elementary school was right near here,” she improvised, returning inside. “Went there from eight till eleven.”

“How was it?”

“Heaven.”

“Not a word I normally associate with elementary school.”

“Oh, yeah? You didn’t like yours?” She took this opening and burrowed in, inquiring into his schooling, his plans, and those of his roommates. Emerson, an unpopular member of the household, was doing a doctorate in comparative literature. Xavi, who came from Uganda originally, was Duncan’s best friend and had been since high school in Connecticut.

“That’s where you come from, Connecticut? From one of those posh old families there?”

“No, no. First generation.” His dad, Keith, hailed from Glasgow, an architect who’d transferred to New York three decades earlier to build skyscrapers or die trying. Today, he was the director of design at a partnership in Stamford, Connecticut, specializing in atriums at shopping malls. As for Duncan’s mother, Naoko, she’d reached New York from Kobe, Japan, in 1973 to study art at Parsons. She and Keith met as foreigners in the big city, their accents bemusing locals, though they understood each other perfectly — that is, they misunderstood each other sufficiently. As a child, Duncan read of kilts and haggis and the treachery of the Campbells, played snare in a fife band, kept a Scottish flag in his room, and effaced his Japanese half. This reversed in junior high, once ethnicity had become chic. By college, he described himself as Japanese. After graduation, he moved to Yokohama, intending to teach English and become fluent in his mother’s tongue. It proved a disaster. “I don’t normally get into this.”

“Come on,” she said. “You’ll never see me again.”

He’d had no friends in Japan, and learned little of the language, except how impossible it was, with honorifics and respectful forms and humble forms — and myriad ways to get it all wrong. After years of claiming to be Japanese, he learned how un-Japanese he was. Wasn’t anything anymore. “This suddenly required me to have a personality. I hadn’t planned for that.”

“Oh, don’t be silly,” she said.

It was Xavi, then starting business school at NYU, who’d encouraged Duncan to apply to law school there, and even found them a sublet near “the university.” Unfortunately, it proved to be the wrong university, Columbia, at the opposite end of Manhattan. The official tenants here were two Columbia students who had fallen in love while falling in hate with their assigned third roommate, Emerson. The lovers’ plan was to claim that they still lived at Columbia, so their conservative families would keep paying rent while they secretly took a place together in Chelsea. In subletting, Xavi and Duncan got an amazing deal — with the downside of having to schlep downtown for school.

“So,” he said, “tell me something about you.”

“Here’s something: I saw a pig downstairs.”

“Not running wild, I hope.”

“Some guy was taking it back from a walk. A huge fat potbelly.”

“The guy?”

“The pig.”

“He lives on the first floor,” Duncan said. “He’s a composer.”

“The pig?”

“Yes, the pig.”

She laughed.

“Sorry — you probably need to go,” he said. “I don’t normally talk so much. Hope it was cool seeing your old place.” He took a step toward the door.

“Duncan, how come you were lying on the floor before, with the shopping bags everywhere?”

“I hoped you’d forgotten that.”

“Did you fall?”

“It’s this weird thing. You’re going to think I’m insane.”

“I don’t mind insanity, as long as it’s reasonable.”

He sighed, then confessed. Often, when crossing the Columbia campus with groceries, he had this fantasy of lying down on College Walk, all the kids stepping over him, nobody stopping for days and then weeks, rodents nibbling at his groceries, he getting thinner, looking up through the tree branches, during the rain, the nights, until he just disappeared. Captivated by his strange thoughts, he had returned home, called out to ensure that he was alone, then lain down right there.

“If you’re doing nutty stuff at home,” she said, “you need to think about closing the front door properly.”

“That was an error in retrospect.”

“Lie down now,” she said.

“How do you mean?”

“I want to show you something from when I used to live here. But you have to lie down a second, right where you were.”

“On the floor?”

“Exactly as you were.”

Haltingly, uncertainly, he obliged.

She hooked the chain lock on the front door and returned to Duncan, knelt, opened her duffle coat, and lay atop him.

“What are you doing?” he asked softly.

“Human blanket.”

They remained still for a minute, his heart thudding, palpable through her sweater.

A key entered the lock. The front door hit the chain and shook.

She rose calmly, while Duncan scrambled up with such haste that he nearly keeled over from dizziness. He unhooked the chain lock. “Hey,” he said.

It was Xavi, who proved to be quite a dresser: smoking jacket, violet scarf, tortoiseshell glasses. Rather than shaking her hand, he held it. A grin spread across his face. His glinting eyes closed languorously and, when they opened, looked to Duncan.

“She used to live here,” Duncan explained.

Tooly remarked again on how many memories it had stirred up.

Duncan nodded stiffly, opened the front door. “When was it you lived here, exactly?”

“I’m so glad to meet you,” she said, and took the stairwell down.

As Tooly strolled back downtown, she glanced at other buildings. No matter how she imagined their insides — parties veering out of control, kitchens with faucets running, angry couples playing cards for real money — the truth was always more peculiar. In a vertical city, cramped dwellings were the only territory unreservedly reserved, each home an intimate fortress. Yet they were so easy to penetrate. (“Don’t want to intrude, but I used to live here. Might it be possible to take a quick look? I happened to be passing and — wow, even just standing here, so many memories!”) Mostly, one needed only to knock, say a few lines, enter. Why limit yourself to the outside when you could walk right in, peek at their lives — maybe even leave with a useful nugget.

She took out her pen and the newsprint that had wrapped her peanut-butter sandwich and jotted down all she’d gathered in this encounter, dredging her memory for every detail worth recounting to Venn.

Duncan had been awkward, clumsy, alone. So easy to capture a boy like that. She grew melancholy thinking this, and it took a moment to recognize why: something in him had reminded her of Paul.

Tooly turned sharply from the notion and tried to keep writing. But she gained little cooperation either from her hand — she shook out icy fingers — or from her will, which resisted parsing the boy’s candor for something to exploit. She scrunched the newsprint, discarded it in her pocket. His life and hers had intersected for a few minutes; that would be all.

She kept perfectly still on the sidewalk, studying the faces of pedestrians, her cold hands balled, her pulse increasing. She had the urge to run from here, and did.