31 Hours (3 page)

The only problem with his sister’s place was Leo. Leo felt ashamed to be related to someone in Sonny’s line of business and couldn’t keep that to himself. Sonny preferred to visit when Leo was out showing a client some overpriced condo or a fixer-upper, trying to persuade them that New York real estate wasn’t priced for kings or working some new
math to convince them they could spend more than they could afford. That meant daylight hours, when an apartment or a townhouse would be showing well, the sunlight spilling in, and Leo could pretend there were no shadows at all, folks desperate to believe that, anyway. Timing his visits to avoid Leo meant a shower usually cut into Sonny’s own workday and wages, but what could you do?

Sundays were generally plenty busy for Leo, but it was too early still for clients to be house hunting. So maybe Sonny would ride instead to Coney Island, where the F train poked its nose aboveground after Church Street and he could peer down into a passing cemetery and turn philosophical if he wanted, or just catch himself some daylight from the comfort of the subway car. Maybe he’d head uptown to Columbus Circle, breathe in the perfumed women, and try to snag a left-behind newspaper so he could catch up on world events, some crisis in China or London that was moving across the world at light speed and might be just the thing that was affecting the mood today in Sonny’s underground home office at what he considered the center of the earth.

One thing for sure: even if the mood belowground seemed as sour as meat gone bad, he didn’t want to go above to walk aimless streets. It was too cold, the kind of acid wind-cold that bypassed your clothes and gnawed at your bones. The kind that brought a bitterness with it, as if it were taunting you about what might have been but wasn’t, what could have happened but didn’t. When you should have touched this or smelled that and you just let it slide on by, like you had forever.

You didn’t have forever. You wanted to believe the food would always taste good and the body keep on working fine enough and the trains always run, more or less on time. You wanted to believe there was no danger you couldn’t scuttle from, and there never would be. That you’d always have another chance to set things right, figure it out, concentrate
hard, kiss someone soft on the hollow at the base of her long neck, beg her to stay. But it wasn’t true. One thing Sonny Hirt had been around long enough to learn:
forever
was a nasty lie, a red line across a neatly written page, a giggling kid with a needle in his arm.
Forever
was an opiate that blurred your vision and sidetracked you from doing what needed to be done.
Forever
was more deadening by far than the Bowery’s
bhang
.

NEW YORK: 7:12 A.M.
MECCA: 3:12 P.M.

Vic arched her back, spun in a tight circle, and lifted her forehead as if to permit God to plant a kiss there. She felt the tip of her careless ponytail reach halfway down her back and was aware of the small beads of sweat that gathered in the tiny teardrop indentation above her lips. At a cue from the music, she spun around and sank to her knees, head lowered as if in prayer, then sprang up, extended again.
You are not human
, she told herself.
You are a flower, blooming, with the power to push away the earth itself.
With this vision in mind, she turned a leap into a glide. She heard Alex, watching from the third row of the theater on the Lower East Side, clap his hands. This was only rehearsal, but she made a brief, silent prayer to bring this same energy to the opening night.

Moving as sharply as she could, Vic shot forward from the waist and then reversed the motion, thrusting her pelvis to grind with another of the dancers—a redhead named Leslie, though Vic thought of her at this moment not as a woman but as pure form. She and Leslie twirled apart as a third dancer laughed on cue in a shrill way that still sounded eerie to Vic, even after all these rehearsals. The unnerving laughter was Alex’s signature. She remembered him talking about what this choreography meant to him—“It’s about how we cross boundaries for love. How we torture ourselves, we’re desperate with longing, but we’re all essentially and finally alone, forced to define personal integrity individually
and, and—” Here he threw up his hands in frustration over the impossibility of translating the dance’s passion into mediocre words—“that’s the impulse. That’s all.”

Alex was a genius. She was thrilled, at age twenty-three, to be part of his company, even if he wasn’t as widely recognized yet as he should be.

“All right, kids,” Alex called from above. “Something isn’t quite right in that one spot right before the culmination. You know what I’m talking about, Glenn and Vic. You two almost
collide
.” He slapped his hands together and said the last word with comic drama.

Glenn, the only male in the company, playfully brushed Victoria’s arm. “We have to save our colliding for offstage, Vic, honey,” he said, and she laughed as if it were amusing, and then he said, “But seriously, you want me to back up at more of an angle?” and she said, “Doesn’t that put you to the wrong side of the audience?” and Alex said, “You two, block it out again, will you?” their voices falling over one another in the hollowness of the theater like drops of water splashing into a glass as Alex said to the air, shaking his head, “Can you believe we’re still messing with these details, and we open Tuesday night?”

“How about if I go here?” Vic asked Glenn, sliding one direction, and Glenn, moving another, answered, “Sweetie, that is
so
going to work,” and Alex said, “You are beautiful, people. Beautiful!”

After another few minutes of this cacophony of conversation, Alex clapped his hands. “I need to dash out and pick up another container of helium for the balloons,” he said. “So you have fifteen minutes, kids, while the cat’s away. Everyone sip on your bubblies and breathe, breathe from the stomach, and then, my gems, we’re going to run through it a few hundred more times.”

Leslie, the redhead, groaned. “You’re such a perfectionist, Alex. Who requires their dancers to come to practice at this hour of the morning? You, you, and only you.”

“I get you fresh—” Alex began.

“And the work’s the best,”
Leslie interrupted, using a singsong voice that made it clear this was Alex’s typical line.

He just laughed. “If you get everything absolutely right when I’m back, we’ll do it just twice more, so how’s that for compromising? In that case, you’ll be out of here by 10. But it’s got to be right because I heard through the ubiquitous grapevine that the
Times
is sending someone opening night, giving us poor second-classers a chance at a life-altering review.” He turned and, with a wave over his shoulder, bounced up the stairs. He was a bit heavier than any of the dancers could afford to be, but he still moved with admirable agility.

Vic leaned over to rub her calves and then went to get her water bottle out of her bag. Leslie might complain, but she didn’t mean it—they were all slaves to Alex’s vision. Vic loved him for many things. But one thing she didn’t love him for, she thought as she took a long sip from the bottle, was that she’d been so busy she hadn’t had time to see, or even speak with, Jonas in a week. Maybe more. She’d tried to call a few times and hadn’t gotten through. She was starting to ache for the guy. She pulled her cell phone from her bag and headed to the one section of the theater that seemed to get decent reception.

“Where you going, girl? Another phone call?” asked Glenn. She waved her hand at him.

The phone rang oddly for a moment and then went to voice mail: “It’s Jonas. You know what to do.” Should she leave another message? Would she start to seem pathetic? That was one thing she’d never been.
She stared at the phone, then hung up. It was early; he was probably still asleep. She needed to stop by her mom’s after rehearsal—she had to see how Mara was holding up. After that it would be late enough even for Mr. Sleepyhead. So after that, she’d call Jonas, and keep calling Jonas until she roused and reached him.

NEW YORK: 8:28 A.M.
MECCA: 4:28 P.M.

Carol leaned over the sink and splashed water on her face. She peered at herself in the mirror and dabbed some cream under her eyes. Funny, the way time had played with her; sometimes she looked good, maybe ten years younger than she actually was, and other times she looked at least ten years older. Now, although she felt edgy, nervous, and a little sick, she looked okay. There had been seasons, many, during Jonas’s boyhood when she’d barely noticed her appearance. With Jonas gone—Jonas
out of the house
, she corrected herself—she’d begun paying a bit more attention. It seemed to matter more, though she couldn’t say precisely why. She wasn’t interested in adding anyone to her life, Lorenzo included.

What she wanted was to give more time to her work. She’d become involved lately in ceramic forms that were art first and vessels second. That took a certain confidence, to put form over function and think it would sell. She was exploring the juxtaposition of female curves with male lines within the architecture of a vase or a set of cups. Female curves, actually, arching away from male lines. A couple friends carried some of her work prominently in Manhattan galleries, and recently a gallery owner in Atlanta had e-mailed, offering to carry six or eight of her pieces. If she focused, she might be able to pull together a show
somewhere. She’d been planning a full day of work, but it was more important today to make sure everything was solid with Jonas.

She went to the closet and pulled out an oversized sweater. Next to the closet hung five pictures of her son, one beneath the other, all of which she’d taken. The top photo showed Jonas at age three, vacuuming, an intent look in his eyes. Then Jonas at four and a half, dressed in a red firefighter’s helmet. Jonas as a clown for Halloween, age ten, and Jonas, thirteen, sitting across the table from her in a restaurant—though she wasn’t in the photo. She remembered the meal, his telling her he finally appreciated avocado, though the expression on his face as he ate a bite belied the claim. The bottom picture was Jonas, just turned seventeen, the high school graduate in cap and gown.

She’d been the right kind of mother for a boy—damnit, she
had.
Now she wanted to be the right kind of mother for a young man who felt things so deeply he didn’t know how to process those feelings, where to put them. She still wanted to protect him—from others, from himself—and at the same time give him the space that would allow him to be honest with her, always. She was certainly flawed, but she was trying. She even wanted, eventually, to be the right kind of mother-in-law, though admittedly she wasn’t sure such a thing was possible. She wasn’t by nature anxiety-plagued. She hadn’t been like this, in fact, when he’d been traveling out of the country; as long as he called a couple times a month, she felt fine. It was all out of her control, anyway.

Now, though, it felt like there
was
something she could do, even something she
should
do. Her son needed a mother now, or someone who cared as much as a mother—though why, what for? She had no idea. Her eyes tracked back to the photograph of him in the firefighter’s hat, courtesy of the firehouse they’d visited in the Turtle Bay neighborhood not far from the United Nations. Jonas still had that round, glowing
face of a preschooler. His eyes shone, probably with the excitement of the visit. He was smiling, too, but it was a serious smile, as if he already felt responsible for something. She reached out to touch his tiny image. “Hey, kid,” she said, “you don’t have to take it all on alone.” Then, by the light of day half-believing and half-doubting her own intuition, she shook her head and made for the front door, grabbing her coat as she left.

NEW YORK: 10:47 A.M.
MECCA: 6:47 P.M.

Mara, listening outside the door. Ear pressed to it like a nosy parent checking a teenager’s room, except that Mara was eleven, and she was listening to her mom. Stifled, intense soundlessness emanated from the other side of the door, and Mara knew what created that.

Mara, listening to her mother weeping. It qualified as weeping because it was thicker, fuller, and more private than mere crying. Her mother tried to hide the noise, to trap it in her throat. And so Mara thought of the weeping as an object with physical form that clogged her mother’s windpipe, cutting off normal breath. Mara heard the repeated silence of her mother not breathing and then the sound of little gasping breaths. Mara feared her mother might eventually stop breathing altogether. That was one reason she listened—so that if the weeping halted and actual silence fell in its place, she could pound on the door. She imagined that she might even be able to break open the door—she’d heard of small people finding astonishing powers in extraordinary situations.

Mara listened, too, because she wanted to know certain things. She needed to know them, actually, here alone with her mother, and she didn’t know how to find out. Asking wouldn’t work because her mother wouldn’t answer. So she listened hard, as if the weeping might tell her. She wanted to know, primarily, how long this might go on and how it
would end. Sometimes she tried to think it through as if it were a scientific experiment. Take, as the first ingredient, a mother who rarely goes to work as she used to because the office that used to belong to her and Daddy is somehow only Daddy’s office now, and who rarely goes to the grocery store as if that were too challenging, and who rarely bathes or brushes her hair, and who emerges from her room for no more than three hours a day. Combine that with a disconnected voice on the phone, at once authoritative and tentative, who is the father, living, apparently cheerfully, someplace without the mother. Then add a daughter who spends her Saturday hovering outside a bedroom door in an apartment eight floors above the city, listening to the mother weep. What was the end product? Mara had no immediate hypothesis. She had to take it step by step. Materials, procedures, observations. And then conclusion. Mara was good in science, very good, though her grades had recently begun to drop. For the moment, Mara was balancing homework with Mom-alert.