Verge

A WOMAN REFUSING

Guy busts into the diner I’m in and blares out, There’s a woman on top of the Wells Fargo tower somebody get some help! I’m scraping the inside of my coffee cup with a spoon. The circles grate; people in booths cringe and look at me. I take my time turning around. She doesn’t need any help, I say. But she’s naked! he says, flapping and squawking. And she’s forty stories up—Christ, what if she jumps? I continue my unbearable stirring. People have turned their attention to us, a little drama for lunch. I stop stirring to say, That ain’t why she’s up there, and then I start again. I don’t even look at him. I can hear his agitation as he lurches over to me, in my face, and says, How the hell do you know? He’s exasperated. Try being married to her for a few years, I think. Try living that life for one fucking day. I finally turn and look at him. I know because I’ve been up there, I tell him. Not just this time. Hundreds of times. And, buddy, I can tell you, I ain’t going up there anymore. In Cleveland it was the pump station, in Boston the tower in Harvard Square, in Lubbock the Buddy Holly statue—which is only ten fuckin’ feet off the ground. No, sir, this is it. I’m not going after her anymore. I drink the whole cup down in one gesture, like letting all the years settle into one fine, lukewarm caffeinated beverage.

He’s not satisfied. Look, mister, he says, I don’t care if she is your wife—Ex-wife, I correct him—whatever, ex-wife, she’s in trouble, and somebody needs to help. We can’t just stand by and let—

I snort out a laugh. What I’m trying to tell you is, I was just up there half an hour ago. Talking her down on a goddamn walkie-talkie the entire way up, with a bunch of people I don’t know trailing me. You know, strangers are full to the brim with advice until an actual fuckin’ crisis hits, and then they stand there with their goddamn mouths open like bloated, paralyzed fish.

I get up there, again, for the I-don’t-know-how-manyeth time, and she’s naked, yet again, and cool as a fucking cucumber. First thing she says to me is, What the hell are you doing here? Couldn’t they find somebody more suitable? Christ. Just for the sake of argument, I say, since we’ve been through this before, I say, What do you mean by suitable? You want a guy in a suit? I laugh. She doesn’t. Someone more dramatic, she says, less… I don’t know, ordinary. I look down at the tar on the roof there. Old baseballs, wadded-up paper, wire, weird stuff up there. And I say, Dorothy, I think they assume we have a common history. She looks off and says, Well, they should have considered the ramifications of that. I say, Jeez, are things really that bad, that you have to keep pulling stuff like this for the rest of your life? Wasn’t it enough for us to go and break up? When I say “that bad,” I make the mistake of waving my arms around. She responds by waving her arms wildly and saying, As a matter of fact, things have never been better. Throws one leg over the edge in some kind of fit. That was the whole marriage—one leg over the edge.

I bet from the ground you saw a helpless naked woman lurching and retracting.

I then make mistake number two. I say, Well, you look great. She says, You motherfucker. She starts cursing so hard that spit flies out of her mouth and her hair rages around like crazy from a wind whipping up briefly. She says, You are the most predictable human being on the planet. You are like Tupperware. Then she makes obscene flailings with the other leg until she’s sitting on the edge. My heart is jackknifing in my lungs—old feeling. I move toward her out of instinct, take a moment of comfort in that: Anyone in their right mind would move toward a naked woman on a rooftop if she got too close to the edge. She darts a You’re dead look at me and says, Listen, don’t be such a pathetic ass. You couldn’t get me to be a wife. You can’t get me down from here. You can’t even make me put my clothes back on. You try to grab me, I’ll just divorce you in a more permanent way, know what I mean?

All I can do is stand there staring at nothing. I’m so familiar with this feeling that I can barely recognize it: Me like a jerk with my hands dangling from the ends of my know-nothing arms. Me looking at the ground, no matter where I am in my life, no matter what successes, failures, confidence, or panic I may be feeling. We freeze there like that for a long minute, until finally she calms down a bit. A light breeze joins us. You know what’s extraordinary? she says. What? I say. You can see flight from above. Yet another completely incomprehensible statement from what always appeared to be a normal, beautiful, intelligent woman. I respond—who knows why, maybe it’s inevitable—What are you talking about? I’m tired. I don’t want to listen to her nonsense anymore. I am more tired than I have been in my entire life. We’re not even together anymore, and won’t be. I could remarry, I could have a thousand different lives in a thousand different worlds, and we’d still meet here, like this, in this way. Birds, she says. From up here you see them from the top, not the belly side. See their backs, the tops of their wings. And she holds her hands and arms out like a bird. For an instant I think, My God, she is as beautiful as ever, she is so angry and interesting that she’s larger than life, and I think, This is it, this is really it, she’s changed, she’s different somehow. If the wind blows, she’ll lose her balance, and I screech, DOROTHY, DON’T! FOR CHRIST’S SAKE DON’T—

She says, Don’t be an ass. I’m not a bird.

So I’m going to sit here, and I’m going to drink this coffee, and when I’m done, I’m going to walk out of here, and I’m never going to see her again. I’m still a young man. I’ve got a life, pal. You wanna save her? Knock yourself out.