Chapters (43)
She grabbed the radio with both hands, lifted it up in the air, and let it drop. Nothing happened. Good soldering work. She kicked it. It flipped up on its side and tipped back over. He pulled Lauren away. “Stop it. I’ll go to the FBI tomorrow morning.”
They didn’t go out that night. He could tell that Lauren would have preferred to just go back to her room in Brooklyn. She dutifully kept him company, drank whiskey with him, they listened to Duke Ellington, but it all just seemed lost and alien to him. He would almost have felt better in a bare prison cell.
He was furious at Lauren.
“Did you tell them we were together?”
She sat reading on the couch, her legs drawn up beneath her, and nodded. What could one person ever know about another? Nothing. But still, she was ashamed. He could see it in her very narrow shoulders, her feet that pointed back toward her—every part of her seemed to shrink from his gaze.
That night he lay next to her, unable to sleep. All the effort he made to lie still, to suppress every impulse to move so as not to wake Lauren, brought time to a standstill. Time—it struck him full in the face, crashed into him like a wave, became something combative and adversarial, and everything became crushing and intense, as if this were the longest night of his life.
Once, as if from a great distance at first, and then suddenly, rapidly, he felt the touch, growing more and more clear, of her hand on his hip—he must have fallen asleep after all but then was thrown immediately back into wakefulness.
That morning he awoke with a headache. Lauren was already up. She was getting dressed with her back to him. Skinny shoulders, narrow hips, everything he’d found enchanting before, now he saw it with sober eyes. He was hurt, but he didn’t trust the feeling—he couldn’t even trust his own pain.
They reeled past each other, between the bathroom and the kitchen and the little tasks of the morning, putting coffee on, brushing teeth, getting the paper. He had to remind himself how to do everything. He did it all as if for the first or last time. Shirt, pants, tie, shoes, coat, hat. Grab his ID. Lauren sat at the kitchen table, rustled the newspaper, immersed in the articles. He felt a sharp pain in his ribs when he breathed.
Lauren looked up. “I’ll take care of Princess.”
He was trembling.
“So you think they’re going to arrest me?”
“I don’t know what to think. Maybe I made a mistake.”
They hugged—no kiss. Not like usual. Soon afterward he stepped out onto 126th Street and wondered if he would ever come back—if he would ever be able to come back.