17 - The Fall

The Fall

             Thomas and I stood there on opposite sides of the elevator, staring silently at the golden numbers above the mirrored doors before us. We were like strangers there, forced to share an eight by eight-foot space in the relative silence of lyricless, familiar music. It was a long ride up to the penthouse floor.

             “You'll do great,” he said, glancing away from those numbers to flash me a white, approving smile.

             I knew it was I who should have been saying those words to Thomas—that he should have been the nervous one, the one who needed edification. But all the same, as I watched the illuminated numbers ascending in those small but definite and unforgiving increments of one, I couldn't help but sense that I was falling. When we would reach the sixteenth floor, I wouldn't feel as though I had reached the top. Instead, I imagined, I might feel as though I had landed. No, not landed—crashed. It would be like the time Thomas had jumped from my dorm room window all those years ago. The floor R.A. had been tipped that there was a boy in room 204, and after a few loud, urgent knocks on the bolted door, he had jumped—he promised he could make that jump—and he had broken his leg. It had been I who had cried, not Thomas, as I drove him to the emergency room that night.

             I laughed now to think about it, but then the “ding” of the elevator, marking our arrival, startled me out of memory. My stomach fell, filling me once again with the falling sensation that had triggered thoughts of simpler, happier times.

             Thomas allowed me off the elevator first. Then, seeming to try to correct the formality of it all, he took my arm. Taking my arm, however, seemed to me to be every bit as formal as when he had taken my arm from my father's at the altar on our wedding day. I had hated all of the formality—the formality and the wedding planning. The dress, the flowers, selecting the songs, choosing the rings. It wasn't until we had exchanged those vows—for richer, for poorer—and eaten the Eucharist together, kneeling in front of the altar and an ivory Christ bleeding on the cross, that the world and its trivialities had melted away for me. And then the massive doors at the back of the church had swung open, and I had felt free, happy, and entirely in love. I remember wanting that feeling to last forever. Twelve years later, my husband was taking my arm and leading me down a long hallway to a penthouse dinner party.

             But before I knew it, the Prestons' door stood before us, tall and grand and sealed shut, but with the power to swallow us whole it seemed. For a moment, I allowed myself to feel entitled. We were, after all, the type of people who went to fancy dinner parties in penthouse suites in the city. This was who we were. This was what we did. We would tell friends and neighbors tomorrow or the next day about the Prestons and how lovely it all had been (we would use words like “lovely” and we'd mean it). Better yet, maybe this was the start of something new. Maybe the Prestons would become our friends, the people with whom we would discuss the trivial goings-on of our daily lives.

             But the way Thomas cleared his throat as he rang the bell sobered me to the fact that tonight was anything but trivial. I remember wondering then if I would ever be able to cast aside that evening, the way one can casually mention any other meal. I wondered if I would look back on the night and laugh, as I was now able to laugh about Thomas' broken leg.

             As footsteps approached from the other side, Thomas dropped my arm, and for a moment, I felt a strange instinctive desire to run back to the elevator and ride it back down. But then the door swung open and revealing Mrs. Preston in a sapphire dress that flattered her shapely but aging figure. She wore almost too much make up, as the wealthy and aging are prone to do, and yet there was a distinguishable warmth in her appearance. She, who had hosted Lord knows how many dinner parties, knew how to make one feel warm and welcome. Such was the feeling that came over me upon seeing her. I felt I knew her instantly, that we were old friends.

             “Oh, and you must be Mr. and Mrs. Stevens! Come in, come in! Can I take your coat? Your purse?” She hardly allowed us to speak. I handed her my purse and, with a spasm of regret, realized that it was the same purse I had been using for nearly a year and that it wasn't an expensive name-brand and that it wasn't made of Italian leather. But Mrs. Preston didn't notice, or pretended not to, which made me feel more at ease. I slipped off my coat, and Thomas took it from me and handed it to Mrs. Preston.

             “Thomas Stevens,” my husband said, shaking her hand, “and this is my wife.”

             “Bianca,” I said.

             “Of course,” she chirped, embracing my arms and kissing me quickly on the cheek. Her arms were cold like the room and hard like the marble floors that stretched out at our feet. “Mr. Preston will be out presently. Excuse me while I put these away for you. Make yourselves at home!”

             One could have felt more at home in a Gothic cathedral. Following in Thomas' footsteps, I stepped tentatively into the large living room that flowed seamlessly into a formal dining room. Above the dining room table floated a grand chandelier, which looked out through a large bay window displaying a panoramic view of the downtown cityscape. There was a vague smell of spices trailing in from some unseen kitchen, but the large, white room was silent save for the clacks and clicks of our shoes across the floor.

             I caught a glimpse of myself in a gold-framed mirror, which made the already expansive room seem infinite in size. I scrutinized my new dress and my new shoes, bought just for the occasion. Were they too fancy? No, certainly Mrs. Preston's dress was far more formal, but that was to be expected of her. Mrs. Preston had earned the distinction of wearing whatever she pleased. But my dress with its white iridescent all over embroidery seemed to compete with the resplendence of Mrs. Preston's deep blue evening gown.

Looking away from my reflection to the mirror's ornate frame, I decided to think more positive thoughts. This is what I do. I go to dinner parties in penthouse apartments and laugh lightly and dress elegantly and smile pleasantly. This is where I belong. Why shouldn't I? I caught my own eye in the mirror and saw the same look on my face that I often saw in my oldest daughter's face when I knew she was telling a lie.

             Suddenly, Mrs. Preston was in the mirror. Blushing, I turned around and tried to disguise my self-examination by casting my eyes at the marble floor, then at the vaulted ceiling.

             “Your dress is lovely,” she said. “Mind if I ask where you got it?”

             “Inez Boutique,” I said in a matter-of-fact way of which I couldn't help but be proud. The truth is, Thomas and I had gone shopping together earlier in the week, we had rung the buzzer, we had been allowed entrance, and he and a saleslady had helped me pick it out. It had been my first time in Inez, and I had felt a twinge of guilt as Thomas swiped the credit card for a dress I might not ever wear again. It was only the second time he had picked out a dress for me. When we had been on our honeymoon in Colorado, walking through a crowded shopping center, he had seen a white gauze peasant dress in a window, and he had insisted on buying it for his new wife, who, he said, he wanted to spoil rotten with pretty things.

             “It's lovely!” Mrs. Preston repeated, more enthusiastically this time.

             “Well, my children won't keep this dress lovely for long,” I said humbly.

             “Children?” A deep voice echoed from the marble floor to the high vaulted ceiling. But we hadn't heard anyone walk in behind them. Thomas and I turned to greet Mr. Preston, finding him wearing slippers, a button-down business shirt, no tie or coat, and a look of concern, maybe even disappointment.

             “Yes,” Thomas spoke up, his voice cracking slightly, “four, in fact.”

             “How did I not know this?” he sounded betrayed and jovial at the same time, as only a drunk man can. The top two buttons of his shirt were unbuttoned and his sleeves were rolled up to the elbows. Thomas now seemed grossly overdressed in his rented tux. It occurred to me then that just as lavishness was the privilege of the rich, so was slovenliness. The only people who had to worry about anticipating and executing the correct degree of dress formality for any social occasion was everyone but the rich.

             “Well,” Thomas said, searching for something in the pocket of his rented tux, “I try to keep family and work life separate.”

             “Don't you find that hard? Most men your age haven't the discipline for that.”

             “Well, I missed the third one's birth,” he said, looking over at me, reddening slightly. “It was the week of the Kohns trial.” The word “Kohns” still brought back the pain of childbirth. But I smiled at Mr. Preston. It was all going to be worth it, I thought.

             “Well,” said Mr. Preston, smiling, “that's what this profession takes: sacrifice.” Thomas breathed an audible sigh of relief at these words.

             The Prestons, of course, had never had children. That had been their sacrifice. I knew this somehow without having to be told.

             Mrs. Preston, who had perfected the art of diffusing awkward situations, offered to show me around so that the men could “talk business.” As Mrs. Preston showed me from room to room and discussed the artifacts along the way, I had to remind myself that I was in an apartment and not an old European cathedral. Each door opened into a guest room or a sitting room or a library that seemed to sprout off the hallway on command. As Mrs. Preston closed the doors, each of those small worlds evaporated back into the nothingness from which they had materialized. The guest rooms—there were three—each had king-sized beds, though Mrs. Preston didn't offer to show me her and Mr. Preston's bedroom, and thus I was left to imagine the magnificence of their bed. Thomas and I had recently upgraded to a king-sized bed. We had come a long way from sharing the twin-sized bed we had shared on several drunken occasions in my dorm room. There had been a kind of romance then, too, I thought. Not grand or glamorous or anything—but our bodies had been inseparable then. One couldn't roll over without waking the other. Now, the great divide of sheets and comforter and mattress kept each of us oblivious to the other's existence. It suddenly struck me that that was what we had been striving for all along—more space, more square footage. And the more space there was, the further away Thomas seemed to be.

             The evening progressed pleasantly enough. There had been a mild confusion about where Thomas and I should sit at the Prestons' long formal dining room table, but finally Mr. Preston had set himself at one end of the table with his back to the grand bay window. After his wife sat at the opposite end, Thomas and I sat across from one another on the table's longer sides, and a man in a tuxedo took away the extraneous chairs before bringing out soup and baguettes and filling the glasses with red wine.

             The wine seemed to bridge whatever gaps I had sensed earlier in the evening. I was more convinced than ever that we were turning a corner now and that any misgivings or insecurities I had felt earlier had been mere illusion. I chastised myself for not having more faith in these nice, normal people. They were, after all, made of flesh and blood—not marble. They were no better than Thomas or I.

             “So do you have a nanny to watch your children?” she asked. “Oh, I hope I'm not prying too much! You must excuse me! Mr. Preston always says I'm too familiar!”

             “No, not at all! I stay home with the children,” I said, sipping from my wine glass, which had miraculously refilled itself throughout the evening. “I worked as a teacher until our first was born. We decided this was how we wanted it.” I looked over to Thomas, but he was deep in conversation with the increasingly gregarious Mr. Preston. “But when we are out—like tonight—we have someone watch the children.”

             “Is she any good?”

             “Oh, yes. As far as I know,” I said, thankful that I had not disclosed the fact that my mother stayed with the children when I needed a sitter.

             “Let me tell you, hold on to her,” Mrs. Preston said emphatically. “Good help is so hard to come by. I don't know what we'd do without Philip. But we've had some horrible ones, and my poor friends, too!”

             “Yes, I know how it goes,” I lied.

             The dinner was served on gold-rimmed bone china. It made me think about our fine china, collecting dust on the top shelves of our kitchen cabinets. We hadn't received anywhere close to the full number of place settings for which we had registered before our wedding, and it had been so expensive, I always feared using what little we had and breaking it somehow. We would use it someday, I knew. Maybe someday very soon.

             I subconsciously watched the moon rising between two skyscrapers throughout the evening. I sometimes felt that the moon was peering at me, like an inquisitive eye between the slats of a backyard fence. As the night drew on and the wine replenished itself, the moon rose imperceptibly. By dessert, it was so high as to be barely visible, crowning the view from the bay window.

             “What a lovely necklace! What is it?” asked Mrs. Preston, leaning forward, and squinting her eyes to see. It suddenly struck me that Mrs. Preston had been interrogating me the entire evening.

             “Oh, it's just an old religious medal,” I explained, tugging at it with my finger, as was my nervous habit. I felt like half the night had been spent explaining myself. “It's St. Bernadette. I got it when I was in France.”

             “So you've been to Paris!”

             “Oh, well, yes,” I said, omitting the fact that I had bought the medal during my visit to the grotto in Lourdes and that it had been fifteen years ago during a summer study-abroad program in college, that I had only spent a total of twenty-four hours in Paris that summer.

             I was half-listening to Mrs. Preston talk about how she and Mr. Preston had visited the cathedrals their first time in France (but hadn't been back to them since) and half-watching the moon rise out of view when Mr. Preston stood up in his chair, blocking most of the window. He tinked his wine glass with his dessert spoon four times, and Mrs. Preston stopped mid-sentence. The moment was here at last, and I felt my stomach rise into my chest again.

             “Well, let me tell you, it's been a pleasure having you Stevens this evening. Hell, let me cut to the chase. You know why you're here. I don't know why you need to sit here at dinner for three hours just to hear what we all know I'm going to say. I suppose it's because Thomas—” Mrs. Preston shifted uncomfortably in her chair, and Mr. Preston staggered slightly, “is one hell of a hard worker. And he knows what sacrifice is. And I've said it before, and I'll say it again. That's what we need at Preston & Thurman. A man who puts his work before his own wants and desires. It's . . . it's selflessness that this business needs! You know—it's not so much a business—what we do . . . it's a vocation, a calling. You don't do this for a livin', not like this, unless you're damn-well meant to. Well, look at me, getting all poetic. I said I'd get to the point. So, Thomas, it's with pleasure, on behalf of this firm, that I make—”

             At that very moment, I felt the blood rush from my face. Just outside the large bay window, a white figure fell with what I can only describe now as deliberation. The figure—I couldn't tell if it was male or female, it all happened so fast—fell with its arms and palms held outward, as though soaring, and looked down beneath its feet toward its destination.

             Before I realized it, I was standing before my half-empty dessert bowl, still staring out through the large bay window, and everyone else at the table was gazing at me in silence.

             “What is it?” Mr. Preston looked behind him, half-shocked, half-confused.

             “Did you see it?” I was looking at Thomas and at Mrs. Preston, who appeared to be more shocked than Mr. Preston.

             “See what?” Mrs. Preston said, squinting her eyes at me.

             “The person—” I was still looking at the window. “The falling person!”

             “Are you sure it wasn't a bird?”

             “Of course. I'm sure it was just a bird, Bianca,” Thomas placed a hand on my elbow. Then he whispered urgently, “Sit down, it's fine.”

             “No, it's not fine!” I said, yanking my arm away from his hand and moving toward the window.

             “What the hell?” I heard Mr. Preston behind me.

             “I—I have no idea,” Thomas was saying, sounding both apologetic and shocked.

             Mrs. Preston joined me at the window. “You couldn't have seen anyone falling, dear,” Mrs. Preston said, trying to gloss over any awkwardness as usual. She placed her cold hand on my bare shoulder.                          “There's no way anyone could have gotten to the roof. There's no roof access over here. I assure you. It's impossible!” Mrs. Preston leaned her head against the glass in her effort to look beyond the lower apartments' balconies. “See! Nothing there, my darling!”

             I was suddenly disgusted by her familiarity, her falsehood. “I know what I saw! It was a white—a man or woman—falling. The arms were open, palms out. I swear, I'm not making this up. I'm not.”

             I turned to them. Their gazes were piercing and yet somehow distant.

             “Someone's down there dying—dead! I saw them fall!”

             Mr. Preston looked legitimately frightened. He stepped toward me, “Dear, I think you've had too much—”

             “I'm not crazy! I'm not drunk!” My body was shaking and my stomach felt permanently lodged in my throat. “I can't pretend I didn't see what I know I saw.”

             I cast my eyes at Thomas, then at Mr. and Mrs. Preston, then at Thomas again, searching his face for a sign of compassion and recognition. But his eyes seemed filled with venomous tears.

             Then I knew. I knew what I hadn't been allowing myself to know for some time.

             Without saying a word, I strode across the expansive room, every clack of my shoes resonating in the cold marble air. No one said anything to stop me, or if they did, I didn't hear them. I only knew then that I needed to see the sidewalk close up, to confirm to myself what I knew I had seen.

             The elevator doors opened, pouring forth an untimely soft jazz. I jumped in as though I were running away from something, rather than toward something. The doors closed in front of me, revealing to me a quivering, pale reflection. As the elevator fell sixteen stories, I feared what I would find—blood, a corpse, nothing.

             The elevator doors opened themselves to me again, and I burst forth across the lobby and past the doorman. And after pushing through the revolving door, I stepped out into the pale silence of the moonlit street.

             I stood there for a moment, taking in the vacancy, the void. My breath froze in the coolness of the night air in quick, small clouds. I must have run out onto that sidewalk, where nothing stood except me and two stone lions, mouths agape, flanking the apartment building's front staircase.

             “Is everything fine, ma'am?” I whipped around to find the doorman descending the staircase. At this point, I was beginning to question myself, what I had seen, what I had done. I tugged at the medal.

I nodded.

             “You look pale, ma'am, are you sure you're alright?”

             “Yes,” I said. “I just wanted some fresh air,” nodding again and gesturing for him to go back in The doorman didn't look convinced, but he stepped back in through the revolving door. Still looking around the sidewalk for some evidence of what I had seen, I felt a strange feeling sweep over me. It wasn't relief, and it wasn't exactly fear. It was solitude, and yet it was comforting.

             I slowly regained composure. A car or two swept the cold night air around my shoulders. I had forgotten my coat and my purse, I now realized. But that door had closed forever, I thought. I couldn't go back.

             But I had to go somewhere. I turned back toward the building with the intention of using the front desk phone to call my mother, the only person I felt I could turn to now. Thoughts flew through my head—thoughts of escape, separation, divorce. There was an impassible distance between us. I looked up toward the top floor of the building. Thomas was up there, somewhere. What was he doing? Had Mr. Preston finished his speech? Was Thomas even thinking of me?

             At the top of the stairs, I looked in front of me at the revolving door and, for a moment, I saw the figure again, inside.

             No, not inside. Outside. The falling figure, I then knew, had been me. I watched my reflection flash on the polished glass at intervals.

             No, I wouldn't call my mother. Not yet, I decided. I would go back. I would get my purse and coat, and I would call a taxi, or something.

             But before I made it to the door, a blackness permeated the reflection. It was Thomas, carrying my purse and coat.

             Silently, he stepped through the revolving door and placed the coat over my shoulders.

             “I saw it, too, Bianca” he said, solemnly and simply, looking into my eyes. “I saw it, too.”