Jeremy Thrane - Kate Christensen - Hardcover - 1 ED

PART ONE 1 - ROLLING HOME I stood alone at the front of the boat. The deck sloped away from me, running with dew. The ferry's prow split the water into two clean lines of white froth as it plowed its way across New York Harbor, that grand old decaying basin rucked up with centuries of tides and traffic. As the wind, smelling of brine and diesel, lifted my hair from my forehead, I felt like the klieg-lit male lead in an old MGM musical, about to burst forth in a full-throttle tenor. Straight ahead, the Twin Towers' tops vanished into grizzled clouds. Off to the left was the Statue of Liberty, green as a garden gnome, and beyond, the improbably beautiful industrial banks of New Jersey: O brave old world, that had such smokestacks in it. It was seven thirty-eight according to the radioactive little numbers on my wrist. I'd left Frankie splayed naked in the sheets, lying on his stomach with his shoulder blades folded together and his arms above his head, sucking a bit of pillowcase into his open mouth as he inhaled, wafting it back out again on the exhale. He hadn't been so beautiful awake, he'd been a wiry, unprofessional, foul-mouthed waiter. He was a complete stranger to me, and I to him. He'd waited on my friend Max and me the night before in a little Italian place on Carmine Street. It had been a nice job cracking him in two and showing him what was what. He'd put up a gratifying struggle. He was a bantamweight, but he was slippery and fast. Toward dawn I'd pinned him, then let him go to sleep and lay there watching him, listening to the mice in the walls, squinting in the glare of the bulb of his closet. He'd brought me to his house, entangled his body with mine. Now he slept peacefully, having allowed me to ravish him. Was it my low-key manner? The fact that I'd put on a condom without being asked? But for all he knew, I was a mild-mannered, condom-wearing serial murderer. I wanted to shake him awake and warn him: Next time he might not be so lucky. Instead, I got up and dressed, let myself out into the heavy, fresh morning air. The sidewalks were broad and cracked; the trees hung low overhead. I walked through a moist, spooky tunnel smelling of moss and water with a greenish light, like a dream, then hiked all the way down a long, sloping strip-mall-covered avenue to Bay Street. I must have unconsciously charted the landmarks and directions of our stumbling journey last night to Frankie's lair; retracing it, alone and in reverse, I found the vast gray empty ferry terminal and boarded the boat waiting there. On a bench just inside the ferry's cavernous cabin slept a fat but frail old woman with her head wrapped in a dirty white bandage or turban, her belongings in bags under the bench. Her face was as purely beautiful in sleep as Frankie's had been, leathery and weary, but free of the disfigurements of dementia, mood, hunger, calculation. I could smell her. She reeked from stewing in her own animal juices day after day, eating garbage, drinking rotgut. I was sure if she awoke and caught me looking at her, she'd fix me in a hostile glare, but for now she was a sleeping beauty, sad but serene. The towers of the financial district grew slowly until they loomed ahead, a forest of silent giants bigger than redwoods, denser than cliffs. A crowd gathered at the closed gates on the deck, waiting to be let onto solid ground. I felt them all around me, mild and still half asleep, heard their soft morning breathing, gentle as cows waiting for the farmer to open the pasture gates. I'd always felt an impersonal, brusque fondness for the fellow travelers I brushed up against on my way some- where, strangers who neither got in my way nor let me get in theirs, all of us suspended together between past and future in a temporal tunnel of watery-greenChristensen, Kate is the author of 'Jeremy Thrane - Kate Christensen - Hardcover - 1 ED' with ISBN 9780767908016 and ISBN 0767908015.