notes of Beethoven’s Fifth. On the TV, I gaped at the herds of people running up Broadway, screaming. The handheld camera recording their escape trembled. A few minutes later I realized: I’ll be no one’s first call.
Okay, maybe my father’s, but it would take hours for him to invent an excuse to get away from Fern and get to a pay phone. Tatty didn’t wake up until ten or eleven and, of all stupid things, my mind leaped back to the times after both her weddings, when I went from her best friend in the whole wide world and maid of honor to once-every-other-week pal for a girls’ night out.
I’d been going out with John for a couple of months then, and I sensed he’d be calling his parents and brothers and college roommate; God knows what number I was on his list. Standing before the magazine’s we-disdain-broadcast-journalism piddling twenty-inch television, I heard one TV reporter after another say horrific. Terrible and horrible were too small for this. “Dear God, save me from horrific,” Happy Bob intoned. Since it would not have been politic to punch out his sneer, I left the building to go home.
I was pushed northward by the crowds surging up from the Trade Center and downtown. So many of them were coated head to toe with the ash of the buildings’ collapse and the immolated bodies. They did, in fact, look horrific. Black, white, or Asian, they were all gray statues come to life, running uptown. Now I was part of the crowd, trying to outrun the stink coming from the Trade Center, the sweaty stench of hundreds, thousands of people fleeing from the terror. After a mile or so, sweat dripping into my eyes, I asked myself how come I was rushing uptown. Where was I running to? To get to my place, where there would be no one?
It was so weird: At that very instant my phone started vibrating. I was so grateful. I had trouble opening it. My hands trembled, even knowing it could be a wrong number, someone desperate to make contact with the person he loved.
It was John. “Amy? Amy? Are you okay? The fucking circuits kept being busy and I’ve been trying so long to get you… .”
“I’m all right. I left the office. I just had to get out and …”
“Can I meet you … where?”
“I’ll meet you at my place, okay? It’s closer.”
“Okay, I’ll park in front of the hydrant. But listen, are you sure you don’t want me to come and get you?”
Later, blessedly free from Mahler hell, I lay in my bed in the dark, thinking about that terrible couple of days after 9/11. John and I stayed at his place watching TV, talking about what happened, what could happen. That was when I decided I loved John and truly believed he was in love with me, or at least was almost there. So what had gone wrong? Maybe I just thought it was love because, for those couple of days, I needed a future. Or if it had been the real thing, maybe our relationship just dragged on too long and exhausted itself. Maybe it was Love Lite. Or maybe John and I were on such different emotional cycles that we never loved simultaneously.
I curled up into a ball, too cold to get out from under the covers, close the window, and get a pair of socks. A horse’s hooves clopped outside, probably taking its last tourists of the night. Poor, weary horses, so cheaply festooned with red feathers or plastic flowers, blinders on, unable to see they were giving an elderly couple from Kansas City the most romantic night of their lives.
John and I had been together for two years. We’d never talked about breaking up. Not even hinted. Two years. Seeing him with that sleek woman: What a shock! And what made it worse was that they didn’t seem engaged in cosmopolitan chitchat. They looked as though they were having a wonderful time.
Maybe it had never been love with us. It was possible I’d simply taken the specs of John—Tufts, sexy, decent, smart, politically sophisticated, Jewish—and, building on them, created my own ideal lover. Or maybe it had
Okay, maybe my father’s, but it would take hours for him to invent an excuse to get away from Fern and get to a pay phone. Tatty didn’t wake up until ten or eleven and, of all stupid things, my mind leaped back to the times after both her weddings, when I went from her best friend in the whole wide world and maid of honor to once-every-other-week pal for a girls’ night out.
I’d been going out with John for a couple of months then, and I sensed he’d be calling his parents and brothers and college roommate; God knows what number I was on his list. Standing before the magazine’s we-disdain-broadcast-journalism piddling twenty-inch television, I heard one TV reporter after another say horrific. Terrible and horrible were too small for this. “Dear God, save me from horrific,” Happy Bob intoned. Since it would not have been politic to punch out his sneer, I left the building to go home.
I was pushed northward by the crowds surging up from the Trade Center and downtown. So many of them were coated head to toe with the ash of the buildings’ collapse and the immolated bodies. They did, in fact, look horrific. Black, white, or Asian, they were all gray statues come to life, running uptown. Now I was part of the crowd, trying to outrun the stink coming from the Trade Center, the sweaty stench of hundreds, thousands of people fleeing from the terror. After a mile or so, sweat dripping into my eyes, I asked myself how come I was rushing uptown. Where was I running to? To get to my place, where there would be no one?
It was so weird: At that very instant my phone started vibrating. I was so grateful. I had trouble opening it. My hands trembled, even knowing it could be a wrong number, someone desperate to make contact with the person he loved.
It was John. “Amy? Amy? Are you okay? The fucking circuits kept being busy and I’ve been trying so long to get you… .”
“I’m all right. I left the office. I just had to get out and …”
“Can I meet you … where?”
“I’ll meet you at my place, okay? It’s closer.”
“Okay, I’ll park in front of the hydrant. But listen, are you sure you don’t want me to come and get you?”
Later, blessedly free from Mahler hell, I lay in my bed in the dark, thinking about that terrible couple of days after 9/11. John and I stayed at his place watching TV, talking about what happened, what could happen. That was when I decided I loved John and truly believed he was in love with me, or at least was almost there. So what had gone wrong? Maybe I just thought it was love because, for those couple of days, I needed a future. Or if it had been the real thing, maybe our relationship just dragged on too long and exhausted itself. Maybe it was Love Lite. Or maybe John and I were on such different emotional cycles that we never loved simultaneously.
I curled up into a ball, too cold to get out from under the covers, close the window, and get a pair of socks. A horse’s hooves clopped outside, probably taking its last tourists of the night. Poor, weary horses, so cheaply festooned with red feathers or plastic flowers, blinders on, unable to see they were giving an elderly couple from Kansas City the most romantic night of their lives.
John and I had been together for two years. We’d never talked about breaking up. Not even hinted. Two years. Seeing him with that sleek woman: What a shock! And what made it worse was that they didn’t seem engaged in cosmopolitan chitchat. They looked as though they were having a wonderful time.
Maybe it had never been love with us. It was possible I’d simply taken the specs of John—Tufts, sexy, decent, smart, politically sophisticated, Jewish—and, building on them, created my own ideal lover. Or maybe it had
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