Colin Harrison - The Havana Room

The joke had one more gruesome laugh. When Judith's new husband took his company public a week later, he was suddenly worth some $852 million, and my obliteration was complete. My knees actually buckledever so subtly- as I read the newspaper article on the way up the stairs to my apartment. You had to shake your head, even smile at the thing! I had been well paid, had worked like a sled dog for that pay, but the pile of security I had amassed for my family had been rendered meaningless, reduced to a rounding error in the new husband's countinghouse.

That Timothy now lacked for nothing- except for his father- and never would, was bitter solace. He was still young enough that he'd be blinded by his new stepfather's supernova of wealth- the nineteen-thousand-square-foot house in Marin County, the skybox seats to the '49ers, the beach house in Hawaii. I, his father, who issued the seed of him from my loins, was reduced to a dead moon in a lost galaxy, a small voice of a shrinking, uncle-like presence. For a time, I wrote him letters and sent him e-mail and small gifts. But these activities seemed to make me cry. Yes, I wept at the loss of my son. My wife, too. Oh, I missed Judith, too, everything about her. Would have taken her back, in a minute, forgiven all. I tried to keep up my end. But Timothy's letters and calls became less frequent. We didn't have much to talk about. I didn't know anything about his school or friends. I think he and his mother were happy. She was successful, Judith. She made the transition. She saved her son, she saved him from me, from what I had done.

Days flicked by, months drifted along. I was silting my way to the bottom. One could rightly ask how it was that I failed to find another job or rebuild my life to some minimal degree. Or even talk to someone. What friends remained suggested that I should move to Seattle or gobble antidepressants or practice exercise regimes banned in China. And as for my loneliness, certainly Manhattan is filled with an abundance of intelligent, forbearing women, some of whom might have been patient with my despair, but I was unequal to the task of finding one. Surely a better man would have resisted, argued, fought, asserted his rights and achievements and responsibilities. But as we always learn too late, the world doesn't care who we used to be, not particularly. My identity proved as removable as one of the tailored suits I used to wear, and I must confess that as I witnessed each piece of my life flutter away- job, marriage, child, home, money, friends, I entertained a perverse curiosity as to what might remain. Certain small lifelong habits, such as cracking my knuckles and double-knotting my shoelaces, gave me unnatural satisfaction, and seemed increasingly important proof that I had in fact come from somewhere and not plummeted out of the sky, wet and blinking and alone, a newborn forty-year-old man.

In time, I got used to life in my damp apartment on West Thirty-sixth Street, miserable as the building was. The place included a living room, a small but newish kitchen, a bedroom perhaps eight feet across, and a small bathroom. I kept the apartment reasonably clean, considering no one visited me. I tended my accounts at a small desk, sat in one small sofa, ate at a simple table with one chair, owned ten or eleven dishes, slept in a single bed. Outside, the hallway carpeting was worn thin like a path through the weeds, the windows hadn't been cleaned in at least a decade, and who knew if the fire escapes actually worked? The super, a retired and kindly Latino man with dozens of keys on his belt, was occasionally seen escorting an exterminator inside or changing lightbulbs in the hallway, but in general he remained in the basement, where he ran an unlicensed air-conditioner repair shop and looked after several young grandchildren. The building housed perhaps fifty souls, and at first I told my fellow neighbors almost nothing about myself, for I regarded my stay as quite temporary. Within a few months, however, I began to study them with more curiosity, to engage in harmless conversations in the hallways and lobby that allowed me to patch together a mental map of the building. It became clear that about a quarter of the building's inhabitants were happy and on the way up- young girls with good office jobs, say, or the thirtyish Pakistani couple who'd soon have enough money to buy a small apartment- while the rest were moving along various angles of descent, each an example of the grotesque nature of normality: the divorced woman of fifty suffering from cancer, abandoned by her children, painfully climbing the stairs to her apartment, her torso shrunken hideously by her disease, her hair so thinned by the chemo that I could see the shimmering curve of her scalp; the ruined day trader who had high-quality pot delivered three times a week; the would-be dancer with bad skin whose inability to get work was gradually pushing her toward prostitution; the manic salesman who ran an illegal oyster-exporting business; the fat man with no visible form of income who waddled out each day with his Pekinese and a red cane, and returned a few hours later clutching a greasy bag of fried chicken in one hand and an X-rated gay video from the shop around the corner in the other; the chain-smoking ex-magazine writer (author of lengthy and once important new journalism features in Sports Illustrated, Esquire, Look, Harper's, McCall's, and the old Life), formerly almost-famous and now in his late sixties, coughing softly all day behind his door as he pounded out wads of filler for obscure sports-junkie Web sites; the Russian couple whose fighting and fucking was indistinguishable; the older Italian woman who lived on the income generated by her late husband's ownership of two New York City taxi medallions, now rented to a Bengali taxi company in Queens, and so on.

Yes, and so on. The mood of the hallways was undifferentiated loneliness, the smell a mixture of air freshener and cigarettes, the sound the chatter of television sitcoms- including the famously popular ones about clever young professionals living in Manhattan apartment buildings. We, the people who stayed, regarded each other warily, for the presence of each other's failure and misery confirmed our own.

Judith sent me a postcard saying that she and Timothy and her husband would be spending the summer and fall in Tuscany, perhaps with a few weeks in Nice when it got hot, and that, if necessary, I could contact her through her attorney. Timothy would have private tutors in each city, she added. I studied the postcard carefully. Judith's lettering was precise and orderly, showing no wild emotional looping up and down, no leftward-slanting overcontrol. I could tell from her handwriting that she'd written the postcard in a mood of upbeat functionality, ticking items off her things-to-do list. Hire house-sitter, pay lawn service, get mail forwarded, drop postcard to sad-sack ex-husband. The happy wife doing happy things.

I slipped down another notch after that. Life, I understood now, was not ever as it seemed; the windowpane of assumption is shattered, the real view revealed, then shattered again. Yes, I slipped a bitnothing dramatic, exactly. I was depixillating, becoming invisible, emptying. I let my health insurance lapse, I forgot to pay my bar association dues, I quit checking my e-mail, skipped the latest movies, met no one for lunch, spoke rarely, forgot what I read, dreamed nothing.

You may live emptily in Manhattan and be well entertained, however. It doesn't matter if you're unemployed and emotionally disoriented. The city- mysterious, indifferent, ever-changing- remains available for inspection. It also helps if you wear good suits from your old job, for people won't bother you and you can slide into places and use the men's room. Yes, it helps to look respectable. Which, absurdly, I did- each day dressed in coat and tie, carrying my briefcase on the way to nowhere. The city doesn't mind if you spend too much time on a park bench or street corner; the city invites you to stand anonymously, windy grit swirling by. The buildings and shadows and faces practically beg you to fall into a walking dream, a speculative fugue. I did not quite become one of those chattering philosophers with matted hair and blackened fingernails but I was patrolling the perimeter of sanity. If you'd passed me on the street you'd have seen a man just standing, clearly in no hurry, making private studies of things that busy people don't have time for. The patterns of taxi movement on the widest avenues. The afternoon strobing of shadow and sunlight on Broadway. The way water moved.