Greed for life

"Hi… It's Lionel. Are you okay?"
It's my friend, Lionel. Actually it's more like we've had this acquaintance for several years, moving in and out of his life and mine. It goes and it doesn't. And for the same reasons mostly. He's afraid of his nothing. We haven't spoken in a while but the anthropology office of his campus on weekends was his passion; it let his mind wander through the empty stadiums of the past in peace and quiet. He could hear so well in the carpeted rooms with their cheap bookshelves and spotless ashtrays that he had begun to listen to the silence and all that occurs beyond it.

* *

Houses-long shards of glass falling seven stories down to the lobby, the restaurant and its overly large ferns and a marble table where I left a pack of matches. There. The moments pass and it starts to seem over, though in the way that an earthquake is over; there's a tower of smoke and terrified bystanders among other things making it impossible to go back in, though I have no intention. I am part of the confusion from the sidewalk across the street, camouflaged well enough by a sudden wind. In my pocket is a letter and in the letter are directions for me to at the small table in this hotel for the last twenty-five minutes until I got tired of waiting and had to go all the way out of the building and across the street to find a free pay phone to check my messages. I only had one and it was from Lionel. Curiously missing now, out on the rubble-strewn sidewalk, are the other words and I felt for the letter through my jacket as for a weapon I don't often carry.
I think that I should have known, because it is strange receiving mail in another city I only plan to be in for three weeks, and at your hotel. But you get used to weird hotel life for no reason at all and become willing to accept messages written by the messenger and to ask where the second pool is, and get your mail delivered to a front desk. All the while it begins to sink in that it's normal and not a front for some kind of hunched-over, Quasimodo reality. Plus, you want to believe it is normal, just like getting the mail in your boxers and a robe on Tuesday afternoon when everyone else has been at work for half the day. Little wrong with that. Little, save the continuous arrival now of ambulances directly to me here on the sidewalk with a half-pack of cigarettes and no matches. I wonder what Lionel wanted, think I know for a second… but I couldn't say if I had to.

The ambulances are screeching into the taxi pick-up lane and it makes me feel scared, though I'm not. Violence always looks like a beginning, though it never is. Something always comes before it. This is America; they don't just blow up hotels without plans for a bigger one. There's always violence in it, but alone it's as useless as the car park beneath my feet. It started long before now and this time, it's different. "They're all different," Lionel would say.

* *

I should say about Lionel, he's afraid of his nothing when he's not at home alone with it, and in this way I guess we're in some ways similar. Out in a bar he's capable of an easy personality, fitting in with the manner that's so domestic no one could possibly object…but it's a façade. It may be the news or some new music but he's quick with the suggestion or the arrival of editorial, and listens for his chance to jump in where others mark their words. It's the sort of solo people respect and regret they can't play themselves. They suspect nothing nor would they, but take his collection of words as proof that he's not afraid of anything and in fact, that he may be a master of mare than a few things. But he's not.
Initially, I thought the letter was from someone like him, but not the message on my phone. I don't like parking garages, but not because they're below ground, because sometimes for some reason they're not. So my car was on the street a few blocks away in front of the old City Hall building and I headed out - I had to go anyway, no matter the confusion. I picked up a new pair of extra fuzzy but cheaply-made- in Honduras probably but that's not their fault - mallets and proceeded directly to the drycleaners to get my tux out of hock. Or so it seemed. Many of the businesses in the immediate area had closed early because of the dust and fire trucks but the drycleaners was filled with that famous smell and temperature, seemingly timeless and stoic with mission in the charged environment. The two ladies behind the counter, thin and sweaty in the steamy little storefront, didn't seem to remember me or my dry-cleaning ticket that deeply resembled all the others stabbed almost jokingly onto the spindle between them and me. A silence came over the three of us as we observed that my ticket was missing an important perforated stub at the bottom where the numbers would normally be. I had kept the small piece of paper for three days, one of my only responsibilities, but it was no great wonder that it had perhaps frayed in the heavy transit of the life of a concert timpanist. They looked at me as though all possibilities had been exhausted until we were reduced to simply staring at each other, but I insisted on some kind of hope there in the humid intimacy of our exchange. I charmingly, to me at least, began a description of the suit, glowing like the day I brought it home form the Neiman Marcus showroom. Black, thin lapels in the Italian mode though it was American all the way, single vent in the back, forty-two long but with athletic-cut tailoring. Oh? Thank God. One of them remembered the black pants with the striped own the side. Yes, that's it. You guys are the best. I knew they would come through and there was even a jar full of free matches with their logo on the cover that I then noticed on the counter. For a moment the façade lifted like the last curtain and I popped back out onto the street with my suit to rejoin the disaster.
I arrived at the civic center early, my suit in plastic and the loaded letter still in my jacket pocket. A janitor let me in through a service entrance then bummed a cigarette; I joined him as he quickly lit our smokes with a lighter and we started to walk. Smoking was not permitted anywhere in the building as far as I knew, and he seemed a bit nervous, looking both ways when we came to intersections in the subterranean hallway than ran beneath the old building. We came to a closet door he opened with a key and took out a broom as we stood there, flicking ashes calmly onto the floor. After a minute I smashed my butt into the industrial linoleum and bade him farewell. Noting the new mallets he told me to have a good jam, as my shoes echoed with his baritone down the empty corridor.
The great majority of the symphony's members dressed at their homes or the apartments rented in the colonial downtown of the city and so showing up in jeans and a shoddy, out-of-season sport coat wasn't exactly customary. Though there was a backstage dressing room appointed to the custom, it served mainly for the straightening of an abundance of bowties at once in rather unharmonic strains of impatience joined alternately with the rote of boredom. So I decided to take a passageway I knew that led to the arena on the other side of the civic center from the theatre. I thought I'd try the dressing rooms of the local semi-pro basketball team so I could just show up dressed like everybody else. I found an open door and after the brief tunnel I was walking toward the court, which was lit up as if for a game, even the small light bulbs in the scoreboard that hung from the rafters. But the cavernous room, if such a space can be so called, was empty except for a mélange of smells dominated not by perspiration but some sort of floor polish and as my steps clicked on the sparkling parquet around mid-court I was stopped by the booming silence. Looking up at the seats I could almost hear the march from Bartok in which I would be featured later in the evening next door. Then I remembered my college rock band for just an instant. But what I heard as the silence died down and my ears came back to the present was far, far away… something… there it is. Bellowing C-flat noise in the revolving whine-wash of a siren, many sirens, in the distance.
An hour later, the backstage dressing room was abuzz with somber gossip about the bomb. Like me, the guest conductor had been living at the hotel for the last month, but he had gone back to Hungary just the day before; still, there was talk of canceling all the weekend performances, which lasted just long enough for me to start hoping for it. Right about then, that old theatre spirit shook the rust off its chains and sprinkled it like pixie dust onto the four corners of the room. I received word from where I sat with a cellist that the concerts would go on.
"Do you think it was for him?" she asked.
"Who?"
"Buderon. Do you think somebody was out for him? I mean, you know, the IRA and stuff?"
"He's not Irish. And besides, a bomb is no way to go after a conductor," I assured her, but what did I know. I looked at my lifeless street clothes in a pile next to my chair. I wanted to pull out the letter and I wanted to have a cigarette but I just sat there, waiting for eight o'clock without a watch.
"It was some kind of conspiracy," a man said, whom I recognized from the woodwinds.
"Fucking terrorists is what I think," said a flutist.
"You know, the hotel is filled with patrons every weekend," the cellist confided to me. It was the first sensible thing that had been said and she was right. The old money that gave the symphony its legs went there to drink and often rented out the ballroom and a bartender just to drink with the conductor and his acolytes. A lot of people had accents, it occurred to me, but it was an unspoken ritual, an unofficial meeting place though now it seemed more than odd, considering these observations, that it was full of rubble and the half-lives of several hundred barely used ashtrays.
After the concert ended I got out of there quick; the encore applause seemed forced and sentimental, though the last movement had been inspired, and I felt like I was in a hurry. But there was only one place I could drive straight to and as I got within five blocks, it became clearly impossible; every type of the unsuspecting type from the fire department to the FBI had conspired to block off every street going near where the hotel had stood with their trucks and unmarked cars parked sideways and everywhere. Flashlights and open doors emitting the squeal of low-ban radios seemed to settle the matter for the moment and I U-turned illegally onto K Street and drove three blocks into very light, but confused, oncoming traffic. I could think of no other destination that wouldn't be filled with chatter about the bomb… so I decided to try the cellist's apartment. But not, I told myself, just because it was close.
She's nice, the cellist, and had instructed me to call her Valerie though she looks more like a Tina or a Kim. She lets me in without surprise. There are other people there, young like her and not from the symphony, sitting on things that aren't furniture such as the stove in the smallish apartment like it's a party. I don't know them but I'm comfortable enough; she invited me and when she tells them we work together they know what she means and are content to leave it at that. I am led to a choice of bottled beer or some kind of whiskey and, taking a sip of the latter, catch my breath for the first time since something ruined a perfectly adequate building earlier in the day. Was I lucky? I asked myself as I looked around the room. I didn't feel unlucky, for sure, but good fortune too seemed farther rather than closer. It was like Lionel had said to me once, "there's nothing wrong with taking a break from chance once in while." Typical Lionel, in fact; even in theory, such choices don't exist and it feels more like that scared the hell out of me though of this, too, I am unconvinced.
But she's nice, Valerie, and when everyone's gone she turns back to me after closing the door and says, "You gonna stay over?"
"Sure," I said, since it was purely up to me. An hour later we were sitting on the floor in front of her couch so the coffee table was just the right height from which to pour shots from a smaller bottle of yet another kind of whiskey and both getting drunk. It was her hometown and her grandmother owned the apartment though it would soon be hers. She didn't much care about it except for the view of the camellias in the nearby square in springtime. And she might sell. But she could keep it and still buy someplace else, another town, another country, this whim was unbridled. And it seemed true that she was careful about staining the coffee table with liquor but couldn't care less about the old apartment itself . It had somehow passed beyond the stage of vulnerability which, coincidentally, she had not. It was sobering to have noticed while I was drunk, but I could tell she had been hurt somehow, by love and its twin. I couldn't have perceived it looking into her sober hazel eyes, but under the influence she'd relaxed and I saw something I recognized, maybe that everything had been let off the hook of mattering too much in her life. With a fell swoop it seemed to rule out any action between us and, pathetically and all in the same instant, I tried to change a subject that hadn't been raised.
"Skydiving would be fun… is gonna be. I'm planning on going next month," she answered to my weak volley.
"Yeah, but in a lot of ways, it's just flying. You gotta get high enough to see something, not just the green patches you see from airplanes, then be able to zoom right down in on it. I guess it would be a thrill."
"You don't seem thrilled," she observed, and I would have agreed but right then the doorbell rang. Immediately I was disoriented because it seemed too late and she so nonchalant about the interruption, like it was timed or I, myself, was rehearsed. I was obsessing about it in a drunken analysis while I listened to her speaking to someone at the door and I was suddenly, secretly, in possession of something. Right then I was seized by my good luck at having left the hotel when I did instead of simply being crushed to death by rubble. I am quite certain now that, in ways, we unconsciously choose to keep on living, no matter how little our life means or how difficult it is to defend the myriad resources we require. We'd take another few years like the last doughnut from the box without even thinking about it, without getting drunk enough later to have to think about it. I was aware of my greed for life for the first time ever, and for the fully second time that day felt more than a little nervous about it being such a close call as to have to rely on primordial urge that I did not know existed.
It was late morning when I awoke on her couch. Valerie was gone but there were signs of normality like the smell of coffee that cast away the treachery that comes with waking up in a new place. I thought of Lionel and felt a momentary pang of longing for my own apartment. Maybe other people know him better than I do. I found the bathroom and then snooped around her bedroom for a couple of minutes. A few pictures of boyfriends and magazines next to the bed, but no signs of the pain I had noticed in her eyes, as though it might be kept someplace bedside. But nothing much more was there than a girl trying to look busy when she was already rich.
Under the sanctity and safety of daylight, at the command of some sort of inscrutable majority of one, I can look at the letter. A slip of paper, dangerous; I feel it still capable of going off in my hand as I read the humorless introduction. I am being spoken to like an employee in a memo about personal phone calls. I felt the same way the first time, let the tone of the letter decide for me to fulfill its command. I'd always been easy to push around.
But now I was burning free time, thanks to my impatience. To some, those are instincts enough though I'm afraid now of my own slavery to every wayward spark of notion that enters this head. Lionel, in his greater silence, could probably hoist a few drops from this well. Maybe it's time I give him a call.