S Rozan - Absent Friends

It almost always worked.

And besides, Laura thought, snapping her tape recorder shut, zipping her bag, how much could you expect to learn about the truth from talking to a lawyer anyway?

She made a trip to the bathroom mirror, checking to see how red her eyes were, giving her hair a comb. While she did this she resolutely did not look at Harry's shaving things on the sink, his bathrobe hanging on the back of the door. Her pale brown hair, straight and sleek and lustrous in good times, lank and sullen now, could have used a little more work, but she stuck the comb back in the cabinet when she felt the lump start building in her throat again. You can't do interviews with a lump in your throat.

Normally, of course, Laura would never chase all over town for interviews like these. There was no time. This was work you did over the phone, in the days, so recent but in another life, when the phone was just another tool you never even thought about, you just picked it up and someone was there. You did interviews over the phone so you could write the story yourself and grab the byline, not the “reported by” that came when you phoned a story in.

Normally, you sat at your desk, scribbling as fast as you could, and you asked people, What did you think when you heard? (The river, my God, how can it be that the river just keeps running under the burning blue sky?) When was the last time you spoke to Harry Randall? (Yesterday, early morning, no time for coffee, dashing out the door, hasty kiss.) What was the substance of that conversation? (Stone [already at elevator, jabbing button]: “Aren't you working today?” Randall [rumpled, preoccupied, but offering that ever-amused smile]: “I have something to check out first. I'll be in later.”) What was your relationship with Harry Randall? (Stone: The ocean with its shores? The ship with its anchor? Randall: Where do you get these things?) Do you have anything to add? (Long, long silence.)

But normally, when Laura asked what someone thought about a death, a disaster, that was what she wanted to know: what they thought. Today what she was going to be asking was, Did you do this? Did you kill Harry?

Not literally, of course. Reporter-Laura would be asking the questions, and she was too cool, too professional, to make a dumb mistake like that. She would be cunning and clever. She would wait and watch and listen, study them, how they sat and spoke and looked at her, when they talked about Harry. Her years in school, her years in Des Moines and St. Paul, and these years on the New York Tribune : Reporter-Laura had paid attention, she'd been working hard, she had learned a lot. And now she knew: it was all for this.

For this one story.

Laura walked out of Harry's apartment without looking back. She meant to continue purposefully down the hall-she was a reporter, on her way to cover a story-but she was engulfed, staggered, by a wave of panic when she heard Harry's door click shut behind her. She plunged her hand into her pocket, terrified she'd forgotten the key, and when she felt it, she dug it out to make sure that's what it was, not a whistle or a penknife or some other hard object masquerading as the way back into Harry's place. She stared at it, cold silver on her palm. Then, clutching it, she ran down the hall, chased by her echoing footsteps, and punched the elevator button, willing the elevator to come fast, fast, fast.

October 31, 2001

Marian had had a heavy morning of meetings: the Downtown Council, among others. There, the topics of the Fund, of Harry Randall's poisonous story, of Jimmy, of Marian's association with what had gone before, pulled at everyone's words, at their thoughts, like tree roots clutching at travelers attempting to pass through a cheerless forest.

She spoke twice, to averted eyes and yes-fine-let's-get-on-with-it nods, and after that she kept silent, one hand conscientiously taking notes on a yellow pad, the other in her lap twisting a scrap of paper into a tight hard knot. She swept from that meeting as soon as it broke, though she herself had always been the first to say the business of a meeting is truly conducted before it begins and after it ends. One or two of the others started to say something as she passed by them, but she did not stop.

The other two meetings had gone better. The downtown arts organizations involved were, in the wake of the attacks, in desperate need of money, and the MANY Foundation had money. Marian's questionable morality, her sordid past-well, that was the way Harry Randall's third story had made things appear, there was no use pretending otherwise-these things, it seemed, were important to people in absolutely inverse proportion to how much they felt she could do for them.

Marian was disappointed by this reaction, but not surprised. She'd been in the nonprofit world, cajoling money out of Peter to give away to Paul, for too long to find herself caught off guard by anyone's agenda, anyone's motives.

But she was tired. Tired from her morning, from all the other mornings this autumn, from the phones that didn't work and the diverted subways and the dust and the children's drawings from South Dakota and Virginia that were taped to schoolyard fences and announced “We Love You, New York.” She was tired from the list of times and places of firefighters' funerals, half a dozen a day, that scrolled silently down her TV screen when she watched the evening news. Tired of having to fight for a place for the Downtown Council at the Lower Manhattan redevelopment table. Of acting strong so that her weary staff would take courage and be able to go on. Of declaring, over and over, that the Jimmy McCaffery she had known-the Captain McCaffery, Marian was always careful to say, to whom so many owed their lives, not just on the basis of his heroic and ultimately self-sacrificing actions in this unprecedented disaster but because of his breathtaking bravery over the years-that this man would never have been a part of any scheme of corruption or cold betrayal, as some were hinting now.

Marian wondered what would happen if she stood and walked out the door. Now, before Laura Stone arrived. She would smile at Elena. Elena would smile back, expecting Marian was going on an errand and would presently return. But she would not. She'd make her way to Grand Central Station and board a train heading north. After a day of sitting perfectly still watching the trees and the towns and the river flash by, she would get off at some nowhere stop in the Adirondacks, find a one-room cabin no one else wanted in the dense shadows of pungent pine trees that blocked the sun. She would clear a patch of earth, turning the worm-rich, fragrant soil so she could plant a garden for next spring. She'd sit wrapped in sweaters and shawls drinking herbal tea as winter shortened the days. She would give up coffee, give up wine and flesh, subsist on the bounty of the earth, which she would nurture, returning, in her labor and husbandry, more than she took away.

And who would miss her, really? Sam? He was wrapped up in the pretty actress he'd met in June-and what a relief that had been, his mooning over Marian having gone on far too long after she had ended their lovely but, from the beginning, finite affair. (She'd seen the potential, and the limits, from their first flirtatious glance; he obviously hadn't. But that was the way it had always been with Marian, since Jimmy. Jimmy was the only lover who had ever left her.)

Her friends-Jeana, Tomiko, Ulrich? Yes, of course, they'd miss her, wonder why she did it, why she'd given up so much, to go live where was that again? and in not very long she'd be more valuable as a topic of endless speculation, conversation, head-shaking, than she'd ever been as a dinner companion, a pal.