They moved on. Merely to be courteous, she asked why he’d ended up at the DOT. His response was unexpectedly impassioned.
“It may sound mechanical, but transport is massively emotional! There’s no other aspect of urban life that arouses such strong feelings. On some streets, if you take out a lane of traffic to build a bike lane, you’ll start a riot. Miscalibrate a pedestrian light to last a whole two minutes, and you can hear drivers pounding on the steering wheel with their windows shut. Buses that don’t come for an hour when it’s five below . . . Subways stuck indefinitely under the East River with no explanation on the loudspeaker . . . Terrifyingly designed freeway entrance ramps, where vision of oncoming traffic is occluded by a blind curve . . . Confusing signage that sends you plummeting south on the New Jersey Turnpike for twenty miles with no exit when you want to go north, and you were already running late . . . You may not give a hoot about other people, but transport? Everybody cares about transport.”
“Maybe so. I think my bicycle is a horse. A beloved horse.”
He confessed to having watched her sidewalk burlesque. “So what if we went somewhere together?”
“I’d meet you there on my bike.”
“Even if I offered to pick you up?”
“I’d decline. Politely.”
“I question the ‘politely,’ when refusal would be obstinate and rude.”
“Insisting I alter a lifelong practice just to suit you or convention would also be rude.”
Like most rigid people, Serenata didn’t care whether inflexibility was an especially entrancing quality. You never coaxed the deeply obdurate into a more ingratiating give-and-take. You got with the program.
At the disarming civil engineer’s urging, Serenata did indeed audition for a voice-over job at an advertising firm, and was hired on the spot. Similar work came in with sufficient regularity that she was able to quit Lord & Taylor. She gained a reputation. In time, she would extend to audiobooks, and nowadays much of her work was infomercials and video games. If she cared little about other people, she did care about excellence, and was forever delighted to discover new timbres, or to extend her upper and lower registers to convey cranky children and grousing old men. It was one of the pleasures of human speech to be unconstrained by a limited number of notes in a scale, and she relished the infinite incremental tonalities in a glissando of disappointment.
Having moved so often as a kid had left her diction exotically nonspecific and usefully fluid. All variations in the pronunciation of aunt, syrup, or pecan were to her ear equally correct and equally arbitrary. She readily picked up accents because she wasn’t attached to her own—and even sly lingual detectives failed to pin the origins of her argot. As she explained to Remington, “I’m from nowhere. Sometimes people mis-hear my first name and write it ‘Sarah Nada’: Sarah Nothing.”
Yet their courtship was curiously chaste. Her guarded quality had tempted earlier suitors to try to overrun the ramparts—with fatal consequences. Perhaps Remington was thus cannily countering her withholding by withholding in return, but she began to worry that he kept his hands to himself because he just didn’t find her attractive. “I know you fell for my voice,” she noted at last. “But when the voice showed up in the flesh—were the three dimensions a turnoff?”
“You police your borders,” he said. “I’ve been waiting to be issued a visa.”
So she kissed him—taking his hand and placing it firmly on an inside thigh, with the formality of stamping his passport. These many years later, the question was: If she’d first been captivated by Remington Alabaster’s respect for her fierce sense of territory, why was he now invading it at the age of sixty-four?
“That’s it for the upstairs bathroom,” the young woman announced, tugging her rubber gloves from the wrist so that they came off disastrously inside out.
Serenata nodded at the gloves lying moist and smelly on the kitchen island. “You did it again.”
“Oh, bastard!”
“I’m not paying you by the hour to work those fingers one-by-one back through the other way.” Her tone, however, was teasing.
“Okay, off the clock.” With a glance at her wrist, Tomasina March—Tommy for short—began the arduous business of poking the inverted forefinger of the first glove and edging it down through the sticky yellow tube by the quarter inch.
Although her parents had hired a cleaner, before the move to Hudson Serenata had spurned domestic help. Oh, she didn’t suffer from liberal discomfort with servants. She simply didn’t want strangers—other people—in her house. Yet reaching sixty had put her over the hill in a panoramic sense. She had crested, and could see from here the decline that spread before her. She could choose to spend a measurable proportion of this surprisingly short and potentially precipitous decay scrubbing the soap buildup around the shower drain, or she could pay someone else to do it. No-brainer.
Besides, though she’d usually have been put off by the proximity of one more exercise fanatic, something about the nineteen-year-old next-door doing hundreds of squat thrusts in her busted-furniture-strewn backyard on the day they moved in had reminded Serenata of her own childhood’s “broken legs” and “rolly-pollies.” Glad for the pocket money (Serenata paid $10/hour—appallingly, in upstate New York a generous wage), Tommy was a stalky girl, long-limbed and awkward, thin but shapeless. Her honey hair was fine and lank. Her face was open and guileless. Its unwritten quality brought back in a rush how truly awful it was to have this whole stupid life looming before you, a life you never asked for in the first place, and to have not an inkling what to do with it. At Tommy’s age, most kids with half a wit would be visited by a sick feeling that by the time they finally cobbled together a plan it would prove too late, because there was something they should have done—at nineteen—to put the stratagem into action. It was a wonder that people grew nostalgic for youth. The wistfulness was pure amnesia.
“So where’s Remington?” Tommy asked.
“Out for a run, believe it or not. Which means we have a whole six more minutes to talk about him behind his back.”
“I didn’t know he was into running.”
“He wasn’t. Not until two weeks ago. Now he wants to run a marathon.”
“Well, good for him.”
“Is it good for him?”
“Sure.” Tommy was concentrating on the glove. She still hadn’t rescued its forefinger. “Everybody wants to run a marathon, so what could be wrong with it?”
“That fact that everybody wants to. I know he’s at loose ends, but I wish he’d latched on to something more original.”
“There’s not that much to do. Whatever you think of, somebody else’s done it already. Being original is a lost cause.”
“I’m being mean,” Serenata said, not referring to Remington—but of course, she was being mean about him, too. “Those gloves—I should just buy you a new pair. Though you’d make quicker work of them if you stopped pacing.”
Tommy continued to lunge back and forth across the kitchen while victoriously inverting the forefinger. “Can’t. Only at twelve thousand, and it’s already four o’clock.”