“I accept that you’re Rebecca Amari, graduate student in sociology at Columbia.”
“I accept that you’re Walter Whatever, graduate student in electrical engineering at Columbia.”
“All right,” he said. “We have a contract.”
4
It turned out that Rebecca had circumvented her destination, a bar on Avenue B, which she returned to after they reached their fragile accord. Bix declined her invitation to join. He needed to reflect on their scrape and assess the damage. Was there any way he could return to the discussion group? Would Rebecca return?
He’d overshot the East Seventh Street apartment by several blocks and now was close to the Sixth Street overpass that led to East River Park. He mounted its stairs and crossed the FDR to find the park transformed since he’d last seen it: There were sculpted bushes and a picturesque little bridge and joggers still out, even at this hour.
He went to the rail and leaned over the river, watching its surface toggle the colored city lights. His overnight walks often had concluded here, sunrise skidding off the oily river into his eyes. Why would anyone swim in it? The question made him aware that he was standing in the place where he’d stood with Rob and Drew on the morning Rob drowned. “Gentlemen, good morning,” he suddenly remembered saying to them, an arm around each. An impression of Rob returned to him: a stocky athletic white kid with a smart-aleck grin and pained, evasive eyes. Where had that memory been? And where was the rest: Rob’s voice, and Drew’s, and everything they’d said and done on that last morning of Rob’s life? Had there been a clue Bix had missed, when he said goodbye, of what would happen next? He felt the mystery of his own unconscious like a whale looming invisibly beneath a tiny swimmer. If he couldn’t search or retrieve or view his own past, then it wasn’t really his. It was lost.
He stood up straight, as if he’d heard his name aloud. A connection quivered in his mind. He looked up and down the river. Two white women jogging toward him seemed to veer away when he turned. Or had he imagined that? He replayed the moment—an old, disquieting conundrum that clouded whatever new thought had been trying to form. Abruptly, he was exhausted, as if he’d been walking for days—as if he’d wandered too far from his own life to reenter it.
He speed-dialed Lizzie, wanting to close the distance between them, but ended the call before it rang. She would be asleep, likely with Gregory at her breast, her phone charging out of reach. She would scramble for it in fear. And how exactly would he explain his bizarre whereabouts at this hour?
His parents? They would think someone had died.
He dialed his mother-in-law. Bix almost never initiated calls to her, and doubted she would pick up. He found himself willing her not to.
“Beresford,” she answered.
“Joan.”
She called everyone else “darling” and they called her “Joanie.” But Bix and his mother-in-law called each other by their real name.
“Everyone all right?” she asked in her laconic drawl.
“Oh, yes. All fine.”
There was a pause. “And yourself?”
“I’m… fine, too.”
“Don’t shit a shitter,” Joan said, and he heard her lighting a cigarette over sounds of lawn mowers. Apparently, they mowed their lawns at night in San Antonio. “What’s on your mind?” she said, exhaling.
“Nothing much,” he said. “Just wondering… what should happen next.”
“Aren’t we all.”
“I’m supposed to know,” he said. “It’s my job.”
“That’s a lot to ask.”
He stared at the colors moving and melting on the river. Joan’s cigarette crackled in his ear as she took a long drag.