Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

She knocks on the table. “Are you there?”

“No. We weren’t bad.”

She pats the table as if to say, “Sure.” She’s figured me out again. She picks up the swizzle stick. Her hand looks like a pincer. She holds the stirrer as though she’s about to tack me to the seat back. The singer walks off a porch full of damaged people and heads back to the crossroads. His voice howls. Something sounds wrong. He hits the note, and it seems to be a lament, but it’s a lament without sorrow.

“I’m getting tired,” she says.

Outside the traffic on Smith Street is thinner.

“Well, I guess I’ll be seeing you.”

“I’ll walk you home.”

“Thank you.” She does a mock curtsy. “Such a gentleman.” She winks. Perhaps her way of inviting me to do ungentlemanly things to her. She stretches her tiny two-martini body and rubs her back against the wall of the old factory.

We walk deeper into Brooklyn, down under the Ninth Street El, under the BQE, where phantomlike shapes push shopping carts filled with debris or hide in the shadows of the steel and concrete columns, toward the old warehouses that line the waterfront. She’s quiet. Perhaps it’s the booze. Perhaps she’s taking in the shapes and shadows along the way, giving them sharper form, animating them with purpose — a future sketch or painting. Perhaps she has nothing to say. We turn west before the projects and into the bright light of the Battery Tunnel. The opening wriggles in the wave of heat and exhaust.

Brooklyn is not the Brooklyn I imagined while in Boston, or Manhattan, or even Brooklyn. I’ve seen the supertankers coming in and out of the harbor through the Verrazano Straits, but I don’t remember them ever docking. I’ve seen the cranes from Atlantic Avenue, idle, and followed their line south, here, to Red Hook, where the dead warehouses sit. And then somehow without machines or hands, the containers get lined up in the shipyards. It’s as if the ports are still thriving and the longshoremen are busy with their hooks. A ship a quarter mile long passes an island with a scraggly sapling, its roots thirsty in the sand or bare upon granite piles.

Her street is cobbled. It’s like a residential oasis in a desert of dead trade. The oaks and birches are thick with leaves. An air conditioner hums and rattles somewhere behind them. An older man sits on his stoop. She stops in front of a narrow townhouse.

“This is it.”

She starts to the stoop and turns. She closes her eyes and tilts back her head — waiting for a summer breeze. It doesn’t come. She waves. “Bye.” She comes back to me. She wants a kiss goodnight. I bend for her and give her my cheek. She rubs her cheek against mine and says bye again, too loudly in my ear. I step back. She ascends the stairs, finds her keys, unlocks the door, and disappears.

There are ghosts on the street tonight. There’s a giant moon in the eastern sky, low and orange. It throws light on the asphalt, light and shadows of tree leaves and telephone wires. My father ran out on us when he was the age I am now, but he didn’t have the heart to just go. First he went to the couch, then to the Ramada, and only after a decade of coming in and out of my life did he finally allow himself to completely disappear. Then he returned — again — for my wedding and stood with me and the minister and Gavin behind what was left of an old farmhouse, the stone foundation wall. I hadn’t seen him in six years and in that time he’d lost his hair, his teeth, and I thought any claim to me as a son.

I gave Claire my mother’s ring, a white gold band with the world’s smallest diamond. And her face fell like I’d just broken her heart, but then the smile came — long, trembling. I remember being quiet, staying quiet, waiting for her to speak, but she didn’t. She kept looking from her ringed finger to me — back and forth.

She wore ivory. It took place at Edith’s in a clearing, just before the rosehips and the dunes. It was five thirty and an August storm was rolling north up the coast. I could hear thunder booming from Rhode Island. Edith gave her daughter away. Claire’s veil whipped about her head in the wind. Above us seabirds squawked and flew inland as the clouds rolled out — charcoal and billowy. I looked out at the congregation, my family on one side, hers on the other. We read our vows and we kissed and the clouds burst. After the rain, a double rainbow appeared with one foot in the little guery pond and the other out in Buzzards Bay. In the receiving line people commented — as though their observations were original — on the auspicious beginnings of our union. We shook hands with people. We hugged people. And Claire seemed to be truly happy — raindrops or tears on the end of her swooping nose, unblinking green eyes. Her cheeks were like two suns at magic hour — what the day was fading into. Double rainbows: double rosy suns. Her grandfather was the only one who shot straight.

“I think I gave you silver.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Twelve or sixteen settings. You’ll see soon enough.”

“Thank you, grandpa.”

“You know, he’d said, taking in her cheeks or the rainbows behind. It’s going to be an awfully rough road to hoe.”

Claire read when he died. “Little Gidding”—the fifth movement. She’d announced in the pulpit of the old barn church, and the congregation had smiled and nodded in approval, “What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning. / The end is where we start from. .” She read it with lock-jawed precision. I had typed it out for her the night before on bond paper and left it sitting beside her coffee and grapefruit that morning. “Every poem an epitaph. And any action / Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat / Or to an illegible stone: and this is where we start.” When we sang “Jerusalem,” I couldn’t help but think we were each the last of our lines.

Smith Street is empty except for the ghosts and the moon and one woman who walks toward me unaware, phone to her ear, talking loudly. She’s buzzed and mocking someone on the other end about her choice in men. Ten feet away she finally sees me. She readjusts the phone. She smiles. “Hey,” she says, as though we know each other. “Nothing,” she says into the phone. “Just someone outside here. I’m walking home.”

A car passes and Marley floats from the open windows— “No, woman, no cry” —more ghosts. I scroll through things in my head. Memories. Images out of sync with song. “We die with the dying: / See, they depart, and we go with them. / We are born with the dead: / See, they return, and bring us with them.” My father, not dead, but toothless and struggling for language. Struggling, perhaps, even for the force, the feeling, the idea, that drives the word. When her grandfather lay in bed in the ICU dying so far from England, so far from anything that was familiar to him, the last thing he saw was my face. His breaths were slowing. He looked at me. He closed his eyes and clutched the gurney rail as though summoning the strength to battle the guardians of memory. He sang: “In the middle of the ocean there grows a green tree. .” He cried one tear — spare and poignant and easy to miss. He inhaled sharply — a whooshing vortex sound marking his emersion into history — drawing him in as though his words went first, then thought, then memory. The ninety-year stoic, how had he managed to hold on to even that much — weeping — lost nobility or nobility revealed? He died without exhaling.

I remember my mother, not dying, but always — her fear. I remember how lost her up-south drawl sounded. I remember her slaps, ice cubes and liquor, her stories: the orphaned children in Virginia — the half- and quarter-breeds — the unrecognizable human mélange: the line of Ham; the line of Brown. I was the one who’d given Claire the poem, because she didn’t know what to say.