Save Me

The day that we moved in, the man who lived alone in 7A, who would have been our immediate neighbor, jumped from his balcony balustrade. Kit and I, carrying small, breakable objects that Kit refused to entrust to the movers, were walking toward the entry of the Abelard when the man hit the concrete.

What impressed me, clutching a blue-and-white Chinese porcelain lamp base, was how soft and soundless the impact had seemed. The man didn’t fall the way I would have imagined—he simply folded, like a stuffed doll, a Raggedy man. I hadn’t wanted to stare but I did. Then I turned to Kit, who knew CPR, but she shook her head and walked past, holding the Art Deco frosted glass lampshade.

Kit was good at all kinds of rescue. She had saved the lives of people whom she despised, including some of her in-laws. Most recently, she’d saved my uncle who would otherwise have died at a wedding and, at the same event, Heimlich-hugged a Great Aunt who gagged on a cocktail onion

The man who fell from 7A had been past saving. Kit could diagnose definitive death when she saw it. I had been disappointed (I was secretly relying on Kit to save me someday).

Now, I stared down at the final “distressed” throne chair that Kit had been refinishing. I sniffed the chemical sweetness of the solvent she used—it seemed a match for the general weirdness that infiltrated our atmosphere. In the past few weeks, Kit had progressed beyond decor into demolition. One morning, a few weeks back, she’d awakened too early and led me to the living room wall, and said, “It doesn’t want to be here, anymore.”

For a while now, she had been speaking in the voice of inanimate objects. She’d started off with food, declaring for her ham sandwich—”It wants mustard.” and moved right along on behalf of the furniture, announcing that chairs and settees “wanted” to live in the living room, or “were happier” in the hallway. But when Kit started expressing feelings for a wall, I knew matters were heading fast toward destruction.

A loud, angry static filled the room. Kit, at the buzzer. “Hurry.” I walked through the widened living room into what had been the conjugal bedroom, now in its current guise, a bedchamber of ancient Pompeii. The bedroom was a faux marble, rose-veined recreation of the final resting place of a long dead couple who had failed to flee the hot lava of erupting Vesuvius.

I identified—I too found it hard to heed a warning, no matter how urgent. Even now, I was ignoring the alarms that swiveled, flashing red, in the rear-view mirror of my mind.

I had known for a year that we were spinning out of control. We had joined the ranks of the prosperous poor, a group that struggled to survive on six figures a year. This was a segment of the society for whom I felt little sympathy, even after I had to include myself in their panicked number. Doing what I did for a living, I had always felt uncomfortable about being so comfortable. Kit and I had done some “belt-tightening” that struck even me as silly—we stopped buying brand name mineral water. And our wines came from farther and farther away, from hot, troubled countries.

I regarded the elaborate bedding piled at the foot of our bed. Kit seemed to be descending into some financial rapture of the deep. Every few days, during these last fast-forwarded months, Kit had raided a nearby palace of housewares. She’d return home to 7B to heap the bed with puffs of Scandia down, sheets of the finest percale. The thread count had risen along with the discontent in our bed; at the end, we agonized against 420, pure Egyptian. I had sunk into the bedding fetish with her, cocooned in comforters.

The last two weeks, we had no cash. We had tapestries, Chinoiserie, Tiger Bamboo etageres, but no cash. I actually scraped the bottom of a Limoges candy dish, a once casual receptacle for keys and coins. And I’d thrilled to find so many quarters. During the last week, we’d had to buy everything, no matter how trivial, with credit cards—even butter went on our American Express. Every day, we did our routine marketing at high priced delicacy counters, emporia that accepted charge cards but didn’t stock much ordinary fare. We had been forced to subsist on the exotic. The last days, we were living on lox.

I tottered around 7B, arms akimbo, as if I could not grasp this situation. As I looked around, 7B seemed to sparkle with cost, as if its unpaid mortgage and maintenance had infiltrated the air, charging it with an invisible menace, like radioactivity.

I felt a gutslide of fear whoosh down to my running shoes. I began to pray, an agnostic’s prayer so desperate, I could not even conclude it…The prayer was just two words, “please God…” and it knocked me to my knees onto a prayer rug that Kit had bought for a song at an Afghan bazaar. Kit had accompanied me on my last fact-finding mission to the shrapnel-pocked village that had become a sort of second home to me. The village had been under siege for so long, my visits had taken on the rhythm of a commute. As always, I visited a country at the worst possible time, during revolution, civil war, or after an earthquake, or during a prolonged drought.

As a disaster-evaluator for a nonprofit aid foundation, I had long been accustomed to travelling alone, checking into fifth-rate hotels that offered a light bulb with the room key. For several weeks each year, I had become habituated to the bad hotels, to walking down their long, brown corridors to small dark chambers that smelled of the national beverage and cigarettes. I was used to the concave, ribbed beds, the insistent song of the toilet, the encroaching damp.

At first, it had seemed a miracle to have Kit there, someone to cling to, in that foreign dank and dark. In a bullet-riddled hotel room, we spent the last sweet night of our marriage. I inhaled her most consistent trait, her pleasant personal scent. For thirteen years, we’d slept close, deriving comfort from one another when unconscious. But in the morning, Kit left my side, eager to explore the bazaars that still operated, although peddlers and shoppers were sometimes nicked or even killed by sniper fire.

Fearful, I chased Kit to the open market. I grabbed her by the elbow but could not restrain her. She’d spotted a rug—under a soiled woman, who had set it out as seating, not for sale.  Kit tugged me aside, and said in a stage whisper, “She doesn’t know what she has there…”

The rug was the color of new blood, short and narrow. Kit recognized the ancient pattern and fingered the pile. She bought it, finally, for twenty dollars, American, and a carton of Kents.

By the time that we came home to Riverside Drive, we both needed that prayer rug. In the sickening symmetry that bad news often assumes, I returned to find that, only two weeks after Kit lost her job as a window display decorator, I too was displaced. Despite the dramatic increase in global disaster the foundation had folded and now so did I. I almost fell onto the prayer rug and into spontaneous supplication, as perhaps five hundred years before, an Afghan  fundamentalist also prayed—”Please God.”

Even though I knew it was crass, I prayed for money. You never knew how fundamentalist you could get. Please God, at least let me get severance pay. Now, I added to the prayer, Please God, save me, or at least let me stay in 7B.

The doorman buzzed. Was I expecting a gentleman? Yes, of course. I rolled up the prayer rug as if it had been an exercise mat and walked into my walk-in closet to face the reality.

At the back of the closet, where, until only hours before, my clothes had been hanging, there was a new rack of miniature men’s wear, the wardrobe shipped ahead by the Chinese manufacturer to whom Kit had illegally sublet 7B.

What I loathed (and loved, for I found it interesting) about the way things were now, was that there seemed to be no global event too major to affect me in the most intimate way. The headlines were in my head and in my home—Chinese traders making a push into the garment industry were now invading my closet. Tonight, the Chinese entrepreneur would sleep in my bed, dream into my pillow, of dollars, deals, and takeovers.

All night long, I’d argued with Kit, trying to convince her that the Abelard coop board would never accept Gong Yu Tong as our cousin, come for the summer.

“They can’t prove we’re not related to Gong.” She stood before me, holding a neat stack of sealed envelopes, all our outstanding bills. For a woozy moment, I imagined that she might have entered a fugue state, signing checks without value, and then tidily dispatching them.

“By the time the checks are cashed,” she said, “they will clear. We’re caught up,” she told me, the single catch being that we had to be out by dawn. There was a part of me that was impressed as always by my wife’s forward momentum.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“That’s not important,” she answered. “It’s just necessary that we go. I thought we’d drive to Wyoming.”

“Wyoming?” I said, allowing the name of the state to become the question of my life. “Why Wyoming?”

 

 

#

 

 

I, a born New Yorker, knew that I was violating a sacred principle of the city:  “Never leave your apartment in time of trouble.”

I was walking through the downstairs vestibule when I heard the woman scream. Through the glass-paned lobby door, I was startled to see a girl, naked except for the odd detail of white anklet socks. She was running, one hand held to her mouth, the other cupping her pudendum.

All along the Drive, windows creaked open, and neighbors called down to the naked girl. She had high white breasts and a Botticelli curve to her hips. Her hair, long and fair, hung down her back. I considered taking off my shirt and throwing it to her. As a child, I always enjoyed movies in which men removed their own clothes to cover the nakedness of beautiful women, and this theme had become central to my private imaginings. I loved TV cartoons in which the hero stripped down to a superpower costume and cried “To the rescue!” My favorite old movie was a film that featured Robert Mitchum continually taking off his own plaid flannel shirts to cover Marilyn Monroe.

It struck me, even then, that Marilyn Monroe was the ultimate female victim, pale and rabbity, nose and lips forever a-tremble, perpetually anticipating attack. And now we know how many famous men abused her; maybe one even murdered her. How I wanted to save her. But Marilyn died before I was born, making that rescue impossible. I wondered if my dream of saving Marilyn wasn’t a significant clue to much of my romantic life. When I first saw Kit, I was reminded of the doomed star—Kit also had an alliterative name, Kit Karson—and the same puffed upper lip and twitching nose. Her voice could go breathy, too and her body offered that creamy softness, promising some ultimate surrender.

Before I could stop thinking about Marilyn Monroe, and unbutton my shirt to toss to the naked girl below, I saw a blizzard of laundry—pajamas, nightgowns, dresses and underwear—flutter down on the predawn Riverside breeze.

“She’s a prostitute,” the doorman said, as he held the door for me. “Why else would she be out in Riverside Park, naked, at this hour?”

“Maybe she’s a nice girl who was stripped,” I said.

 

 

#

 

 

The car was loaded to the sunroof. I shared the front seat with tote bags stuffed with snack foods. Sitting in the backseat, big as passengers, were two more recycling sacks that lolled like thick, retarded offspring. Through the sheer blue plastic skin, I could see the jumble of clothing, a miniature food processor and coffee grinder. We looked for all the world like an up-scale version of The Grapes of Wrath. 

As we headed west, the sun rose behind us, and we left the city in the shadow of the previous night. I thought of all the people, still asleep, curled up in their own beds. I looked at my wife and tried to understand how we had come to embark on this journey.

Kit was intent, frowning, as she drove. Her once sharp, Can-You-Draw-Me? pert profile was blurred by a recent weight gain. Kit had started eating, the way other people drank. Even now, at every red light, she plunged her hand into a crackling bag of potato chips.

Her dissatisfaction had taken the form of fat. The fat obscured her prettiness, doubled her chin and hung from her upper arms, giving her a meaty, combative look. Her eyes, once so wide and sky-blue with innocent flurries of white, had narrowed to colorless slits. She was starting to appear porcine, an impression enhanced by her increasing ruddiness. I felt disloyal but I couldn’t help but fear that Kit was boomeranging, genetically, to the stout parents who had raised her on a Pennsylvania pig farm.

And there was more—just because she was eating the way other people drank, did not mean that she wasn’t also drinking—she was. Vodka. She’d started with miniature decanters to “sample” different nationalities. Within the last two weeks, she’d graduated to large, discount bottles, the most recent, qualifying by its handle, as a jug. Not only that, but she’d also started smoking—a plume now always spiraled over her fair head. I could actually hear her smoke—she bit the filters and sucked the butts.

She was smoking and snorting now, screaming at traffic although there was only one vehicle, a de luxe private garbage truck, on the road ahead of us.

She’s going to explode, I thought, watching her. Her face looked bloated, mottled with rage. The extra weight and her mood had crowded her features into the center of her face, puffed her cheeks and pursed her lips. The menthol 100 cigarette was clamped in her tiny pink mouth, looking like a vandal’s joke. Her eyes burned with miniscule red centers, the blue of gas jets.

I asked why she was so angry. Was she angry at me?

“Sorry it shows,” she snapped.

What was “it”?

I had mentioned the word “therapy” once and she had thrown a shoe. I did not know what to do. Was she crazed, or only impossible? It didn’t seem likely I could have her committed—she was still staple-gunning swag draperies and ordering mineral water. She had “run” their home, better than ever, right up until the last moments. And their exit, while hasty, had not been unplanned. And now they were on their way to Wyoming. Why, I kept wondering, Why Wyoming?

By the time we reached the West Side Highway, I felt a drag on my gut each time Kit put on the brakes. Mistake, mistake, I thought.

My months of sick and septic travel had taken their toll, I conceded. I’d come home from this last trip to the Eastern Europe more than defeated: the mission had become inverted. Not only had I not saved the population of the last blasted village— I’d fled, infected by their fear. Instead of exporting the shiny excess of America, I’d imported foreign desperation, smuggled it home inside me, like an internal parasite, which I also had.

An incident haunted me. During my final trip, I’d been eating dinner in the best restaurant of a bombed city. The evening had been, as the evenings were, surprisingly gay (it was the days that were grim). Fiery liquor had flowed, and the company of foreign correspondents was animated. I had been nibbling on black market meatballs when a woman burst into the restaurant. She was wrestled to the door by the waiters, but in the struggle, her coat fell off, revealing that she was naked. She was so soiled, that her nudity had not been immediately apparent—the dirt covered her like a charcoal bodysuit. Even in the dimness of the restaurant, I had been shocked to see the swing of her eggplant-like breasts, and the giveaway curlicues at her crotch. I’d leaped up to offer my jacket, when the waiter-revolutionaries had lifted her like a chair, carted her out to the alley. But before she was tossed outside, the woman had pointed at me, and shrieked—it was my fault. I was killing her; I was responsible for prolonging her stay in hell.

Was I somehow responsible for her pain?  What had the woman meant?  That I extended the siege, by supplying food and medicine?

Now, as we fled New York, loaded with our own provisions, I could not feel immune from blame. I accepted some terrible truth in every accusation, whether hurled by a strange woman or my own wife. The war overseas made no more sense to me than the battle that had waged in 7B.

A more mundane ordeal lay directly ahead—the tiled terror of the Holland Tunnel. I squeezed my eyes shut as the ceramic tube closed over us; I thought of the tons of river water above, coursing toward the sea. I was glad that I wasn’t at the wheel. I felt that I would have given in to panic and steered into the walls. No wonder I surrendered to Kit.  Maybe she was going crazy, but at least she was still going. Somewhere.

We emerged into the grunge of New Jersey at dawn. Purple refinery stacks burned against a reddened sky. The chemical stench was so strong, it seemed visible—the lavender fog that hovered over the refineries. I had traveled all over the world, and never seen a landscape as alien as this one; it could have been presented, in a science fiction film, as a Martian heliport.

We turned onto a six-lane highway, headed west. I leaned against the headrest. Kit drove at illegal speed, as at her side a portable anti-theft radio blared that overnight, on the other side of the world, there had been further inroads made by militants, and more ancient cities had fallen, and precious antiquities destroyed by sledgehammer. Giant impassive statuary that had stood for centuries crumbled into dust. Marble statues of gods were beheaded. There was one ray of hope: one city and one temple that had been recovered, its gods and its people allowed to keep their heads. That country declared itself free and a democracy.

That’s wonderful, I thought, but wondered why such good news failed to bring even scant relief. It struck me as too soon after the death of “the second most wanted terrorist” and an undersea earthquake in Pakistan, where it seemed one third of the country was submerged in water. A freak tsunami sucked the sea back and exposed a mile of usually underwater terrain. A newscaster droned on about the deaths of a million fish and the many thousands of perishing tiny organisms that depended on living coral. Wars were breaking out on every continent, and I feared that Kit and I and maybe everyone else were nearing the end of something, as if some higher order had instructed—You have one more month to wrap things up. Something of untold horror was imminent. Maybe an asteroid? But surely, as in a movie, that could be deflected. I had long imagined solutions to global warming. Hadn’t there once been “the year without a summer” when a volcano spewed so much smoke, it cooled the atmosphere? Okay, that had been too cool. But now, a clever scientist might control that smoke cloud, manufacture it so it was just the right amount to cool down the overheating planet. Yes, that could happen. Maybe I could help by writing to some great institute?

And now the car radio news relayed in a civil clipped tone that “Cat 5 hurricanes were obliterating most of the islands in the Caribbean.” Tsunamis, cyclones and earthquakes were rattling the globe and my bones. The earth was shaking itself free of mankind. I felt as if every vintage sci-fi low budget movie, in which wan, stringy-looking aliens cautioned humans that they were soiling their own planet, had now come true: a morality tale. Too late.

These events exhausted me, as if I’d been involved in them, as in a small way, I had. I lay back, staring out the open sunroof at a pink and platinum sky, and worried about the starved dying, the soon-to-be slaughtered millions of the earth, and now, without warning, a new metallic shriek in our car’s engine.

Kit denied that our car was screaming.

“It just hasn’t been driven,” she said. True, the air conditioning had failed, but now that she had turned it off, and used the sunroof for ventilation, the car should cool…but it didn’t. The dashboard lit with lively symbols—oil cans, red arrows. Kit at last acknowledged the car’s flickering electric warnings:

“We’re overheating and burning oil.”

“Not ‘we.'” I corrected. “The car is overheating.”

“Whatever,” she snapped, “If it keeps up, we’ll crack the head. Then we’re dead.” A cracked engine head was the ultimate car injury, she said. It was always fatal.

Kit slowed, scouting for a place to ease off the road. The car, dripping oil and rudely backfiring, seemed at one with its foul environment. It joined a motorcade of thousands that moved, hump-backed, en masse toward the horizon. It had to be an optical illusion, but it seemed to me that as we climbed the wide highway toward that distant demarcation, that I could feel the curvature of the globe. The little car strained, passing black gasses, in company with its kind. The sun glanced from the many metal rooftops. I shut my eyes against the glare. I inhaled the fumes, and exhaled with a sigh—Wyoming.

Every few miles, Kit turned onto the berm of the highway to let the car rest and cool off. She nursed it with fluids. At gas stations, she bought coolant and spring water. Kit had some machisma about attending to the car herself, although the gas station attendants cried out warnings, as she stood poised before the open hood, watching the radiator cap steam and hiss.

“That could blow on you, baby,” one man said, as he watched Kit, a rag in her hand, begin to twist toward “Open.”

They drove on, by stop and start, the car oozing a green fluid, like fluorescent chartreuse blood from its entrails, marking their trail. Kit said that we could not afford to stop at a bonafide car repair shop until the next day. By then, our charge cards would be transfused with the new cash, and peppily revive and offer credit. Until then, we must rely on self-service.

Although we had only been gone a few hours, I felt as if we had been living in the car for days; the mats were sticky with spilled soda, and gritty with Kit’s crumbled chips and pretzel bits. I was sweating through my shirt, and had to wrap a handkerchief around my forehead to prevent the perspiration from dripping into my eyes.

It was almost dusk when we reached the Exxon station, set against the matte buff and gray of the Jersey flats, a place where man and nature conspired to create an apparent endless wasteland. The station was operated by East Indians Sikhs, and a turbaned attendant offered to help. Kit refused his assistance and went off to fetch more orange drink for herself and oil for the car.

I got out of the car and walked down a slight grade behind the station. I found a margin of greenery that descended to what might have been a brook but with its lime green tint and occasional puffs of mustard-colored foam was more likely some chemical runoff. Still, I sat down beside the iridescent stream and somewhat enjoyed the respite; I could hear the gurgle of the water, rather than concentrate on the not-very-distant diesel thunder of the road.

I was recalling more sylvan glades and blaming Kit for our current predicament when I heard her scream. I had read of people having their clothes blown off them. I knew that a flash flood or a fire’s backdraft could strip a person naked. But I’d never seen it happen until Kit came flying, nude, her hair frizzed upward as if moussed into a new, violent spiked style. She came straight at me, as if on rollers like a special effect in some low budget horror film. She was not only naked; she was in some sort of electroshock—her blue eyes bulged, showing white all around.

Wooosh. Woooomp. She slammed straight into me. I felt an electric arc of power, as if I’d been thrown by a master of jiu jitsu. I picked myself up, and saw that Kit had landed in the dirt beside me.

She appeared as a white marble statue of herself. Her lips were blue, as if painted with an inappropriate lipstick. Her eyes were open, but the irises had slid in opposite directions into the sockets. Her tongue drooped from her open mouth. She was, to all appearances, dead.

Without thinking, I fastened my mouth onto hers and exhaled into her. I wasn’t sure that I was performing correctly, but I tried to follow the rhythms of artificial respiration. A geyser of orange soda spouted from her mouth. I pressed her chest again, hard. I continued to breathe into her, to pound her chest, in spite of her breasts with their puckered blue nipples. I followed the motions of resuscitation for what seemed like too long. My hand hurt and my own lungs burned.

My urgency was such that I was not aware of speaking but I could hear someone say “One. Two.  I love you.” I couldn’t swear that I did love her, but that didn’t seem to matter now, anyway.  Life needed no excuse, or even reason to be saved. I had to save her; I had to save anyone, if I could.

One. Two. One. Two. She gagged and drooled. Her eyeballs rolled back into alignment in their sockets, clicking back on as though battery operated. That tension that signals the life force straightened her limbs and made her twitch. She stiffened her spine, straightened her neck—Kit came back to life, and with a vengeance.

“Don’t pound me so hard,” she said.  “I’m fine.”

I knew that she would survive when she asked, “How’s the car?”

How was the car? I looked up and saw that it had exploded. What had happened? Had Kit done something incorrect when she served up the last oil and water? Or could she have been so foolish as to light up one of her extra-long menthol cigarettes?

All our belongings that had been piled inside the car had blown out through the sun roof. I saw our clothes, the bits and pieces of our lives, strewn around the Exxon station. A torn section of my “Personal and Crucial” portfolio landed near me. What appeared to be my birth certificate blew past me.

Kit was berating me for my CPR style, when I had a religious vision. Gandhi was running out of the Exxon station. He looked like Gandhi, anyway; he wore white. He ran toward us, his bony arms held out as if for an embrace.

Then I recognized him—he wasn’t Gandhi—he was the Sikh who ran the gas station. In a cerebral striptease, he was unwrapping his turban as he ran, spinning round, toward where Kit lay. As he moved, the gauze unfurled like an endless bandage.

It was perhaps the most extraordinary moment in my life. I heard the familiar, almost homey sound of sirens. The first ambulance appeared. At a distance, the ambulance looked miniaturized, and, with its cherry–red and sapphire-blue lights swiveling, cheery as a child’s toy.

“I’m not going to the hospital,” Kit said.

We both looked up. The sun was setting over the Exxon station. The sky fired like an electric grid. Then the hot orange and fuschia streaks faded and the lights of the station and the emergency vehicles began to dominate the oncoming night. As darkness settled over us, I could imagine how we appeared from afar—our accident set aglitter, like a costume brooch, flashing on the flat chest of this dull, wide highway.

I felt the exhilaration I thought Kit must have always known right after a rescue. My own heart pounded, and I was breathing hard. I felt strong and light, as if I could run for miles. I watched in wonder as the Sikh completed his head-unwrapping and bowed, allowing his blue-black hair to fall like a curtain in front of his face. As the Sikh knelt over Kit, I realized what the other man intended to do. I put out my own hand to stop him.

“No,” I said, “let me.” Then I unbuttoned my own shirt, leaned over the naked, protesting Kit, and covered her.

Laura Shaine Cunningham is an author, playwright and journalist: her memoirs, Sleeping Arrangements and A Place in the Country, were excerpted in The New Yorker and The New York Times. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and many literary journals. Her plays have been produced at Steppenwolf and on Theatre Row and published in many anthologies. She has been awarded: two NEA, two NYFA Fellowships, both in Literature and Theatre, and a Yaddo Fellowship. Her new memoir, Forbidden Russia, an American Playwright in Moscow, Ukraine, Belarus and Beyond will be published next year.