"Sewing Lesson"

In an effort to expand The Information Processor into a more comprehensive cultural outlet - a blogzine, if you will, a la Harper's and The New Republic - we here at TIP are pleased to announce the addition of short fiction, poetry, and film culture as newly added mainstays. For those interested in submitting short stories, poetry, or film writing, please email either Aristides or Godysseus with submissions. Qualified entries will be posted based on merit and excellence. We at TIP look forward to a new stage in the ever-evolving process of providing the highest quality blogzine to the global community. We sincerely appreciate your support while we attempt to transition into the future of our own small place in the blogosphere.

• What follows is a short story written by Godysseus upon the first anniversary of September 11th. (2002)

"Maybe it's always cold here."

Today is the 15th of December. Kate and I stand on an observation deck made of plywood.
We have been around this place before, almost two years ago. January of 2000 was especially
cold, because on that crisp morning we stood up there with our friend Marco, outside, looking down over the sunken patches of sunlight that blanketed the whole grid. Kate squeezed my hand that afternoon and we stood high above the bottom of winter. We both wore wool mittens. My coat was also wool, gray and snug. She whispered across her own visible breath and gripped the white metal railing with her left hand, gripped it so tightly I imagined her hand painted the very same creamy pallor inside the wool mitten: "The city looks like it's being seen for the first time, doesn't it?"

Some Japanese tourists smiled and took pictures around us, with Ellis Island prominent far
below in the background of their final group photo.

"Yes," I said, nearly twenty years old and convinced that my life was as perfectible as Manhattan's sprawl, seen as it was, then, from above. "It always does this time of day."

***

Marco made me his friend the summer after my freshman year, the summer of 1999. He was my roommate in Munich that summer and we took German language courses in the city. He had just graduated from college and was an exemplary Italian, and his post-collegiate priorities revolved more around sleeping with native speakers than speaking to them. Through his impassioned lectures to me about confidence and the Calvino cool, I learned a lot about women. "Stick with Calvino and Murakami, women love stories about unhappy couples and birds." We both grew to love the oddly correct asymmetry of every German woman's face, and we read Kafka aloud in angry, hyperbolically Germanic accents in the English Garden and drank cheap Burgundy until we fell asleep and awoke sunburned, happy. Marco set a goal to grow his hair out in the manner of Hugh Grant. The summer's end came like a Munich dawn, slapping us too soon with the stinging lull of late August. We promised to stay in touch and he wished me luck in my second year at Yale. He told me I could visit him in New York as soon as he found an apartment. "We'll waste a day with the tourist thing, just to be corny," he said at his gate in the Frankfurt airport as we said our goodbyes. "Twin Towers and all that rot."

***

It is getting closer to Christmas and Kate is an echoing cave. Her skin is gray, ghostly, tonight.
She knows better, not wearing enough layers in this hypothermic cold. Three months ago she
took a home pregnancy test and called me in a stranger's voice. I ran across campus to her
room to hold her and tell her I would do everything I could. In my solar plexus I felt a sick relief when she told me it was okay, she was going to do everything she could. Her appointment at the clinic (she insisted on calling the entire procedure an "appointment") was on a Tuesday, the 11th of September, at 9:30 AM. Everything went according to plan. Since then she has slept often and laughed less. She thought going into New York in December would make her fell better because of an article she read a month ago in The New York Times Magazine. The article was about apartments in the city and how they record personal narratives, how everyone has their own personalized New York and how everything in the city, even the most obscure Chinese restaurant, means millions of things in millions of unknowable ways. The phrase that gave Kate trouble as she read the article to me aloud was "eight million private New Yorks." That phrase made me dizzy and I climbed out of bed to open the slanted window in my dorm room. I stuck my head outside into a November wind that barely penetrated the purple silences between the naked elms and gothic spires. Snow dust blew softly onto the planks of my filthy hardwood floor. Stepping over overdue library books I asked Kate if she thought what we had done in September was wrong. She did not answer but mumbled something about flowers for my room. She kept mumbling something I couldn't understand. At last I understood. "Baby's breath," she she half-sang holding herself and trembling, unable to weep while watching the plumes of her cracked voice undulate through the morning ether. "Baby's breath is impossible to find in winter, isn't it?..."

***

Right now we take a cab toward Fifth Avenue to pretend we are inside a Meg Ryan vehicle, able to stroll casually with the other private New Yorkers on the sidewalk as we hide in glowing storefront auras and wait for something good to happen. Ten minutes later we are walking until Kate stops short in front of The Gap and begins laughing for no good reason.

"You're wearing the coat."

"Of course I am," I say in a voice full of false dignity, "this is my favorite coat of all the coats I've ever known, or owned, for that matter." I grin and notice it.

"But it looks so ridiculous!" She nearly screams through her laughter. "You're missing the top button again! Didn't I sew it back on?"

Kate always looks surprised when she laughs this hard - her blond eyebrows retreat high into her forehead - and I am in love with her for it. She is correct, however. I am missing the top button, and when I wear the coat buttoned as I do now, I look shabby and defeated, as though I am trying earnestly to be someone I am not and have missed the mark by a single forgotten detail.

"I still remember you chasing after it," she gasps above intermittent bouts of laughter. "That Saturday on top of the Tower. You nearly knocked Marco and his girlfriend over the railing when you ran after it that day. Remember? When was that? God, it's been two years, hasn't it?"

She has stopped laughing now.

I do remember.

"It fell out of nowhere," I begin numbly, "one minute I felt it beneath my thumb, rolling it around on the coat as we looked over the city - Christ Kate it was so golden, even the shadows were radiant that day, weren't they? - and the next minute it was gone," I hear myself say, suddenly afraid of disappearing. "The thread that held it was barely there, like fabric softener, and it felt so insubstantial against my thumb, shocking, almost grotesque, like an exposed vein. When it hit the concrete I heard it. Loud. I ran after that button because...because I had to, like if I didn't get it back it would become some intolerable absence, irreplaceable. Bizarre, wasn't it?" I ask Kate, wondering if she notices how scared I am. "Getting so upset over a stupid button."

Kate yawns a cat yawn and pulls me gently into her arms. "Well...you know. Those metallic buttons with designs carved into them are just about impossible to replace. One of a kind. Like me," she says smiling. "Where is it now though?"

She needs small, believable answers like hand-held TV sets. "I sewed it back on for you," she says in a feline voice to match her yawn. "Did you really lose it this time?"

She is tall, almost 5'11", and I do not have to look too far down to feel the bedrock of her porcelain gaze. Before answering I pause and glance at the right sleeve of my gray wool coat. In relief to Kate's hips, shopping bags form a temporary transient life-paper. Suddenly a stroller passes cradling a baby wrapped in an overabundance of warm things. Then an oversized bag from FAO Schwartz.

"Yeah, I lost it," I say, "walking to class at the beginning of the semester. When I realized it was gone and went back to look for it I couldn't find it. Almost as if it vanished, but it didn't matter."

"Oh," she says. "Well if you leave the coat undone no one will notice it's gone." Kate smiles and sighs and starts moving again. "Here," she says, "stand close to me. I'll keep you warm and you'll keep your dignity."

Both of us make a sound like laughter.

We walk down Fifth Avenue in a lateral embrace, unsure whether what we keep doing is called nostalgia or despair, or if there can be a difference for us anymore.

***

"Listen, you're coming into the city to meet Mary, the Scottish one I told you about."

Marco called me out of the blue the first week of the new millennium. He hadn't spoken or written a word to me since our summer farewell at the Frankfurt airport. Now he was calling me for the first time in the new thousand years and wanting me to meet another girl he would most cetainly not marry. "Good," I thought, "there's someone I want him to meet too."

Kate comes from Boston and told me she hated New Orleans when we first met at a party in the fall of my sophomore year. Being from New Orleans I told her I way sympathetic, and that aside from the exquisite food and the aboveground cemeteries, I hated it as well.

By the time I got Marco's phone call that January morning, Kate and I were already living as one, entangled in an undiscovered glade, both of us incapable of imagining a version of reality wherein the other was not present and necessary, like an elbow or kneecap. We were between semesters and had nothing but not-yet time for a week. Dorm sex when no one was around to appreciate our efforts resounded with a hollowing emptiness. An vacant campus filled vacant hours, so we decided to burn some of them in New York with Marco and Mary. Maybe see some corny tourist sites like corny tourists. The Twin Towers and all that rot.

"That's a nice look for you, Sinatra!" Marco yelled at me across the dank main atrium in Penn Station later that day. It was almost noon. Kate laughed. My black turtleneck and gray knit pants went well with the gray wool coat, though, even if the ensemble boasted an urbanity I could never pull off around people who knew me well. "You must be Mary," I said to Mary, the Scottish waif Marco mentioned in Munich whom he had dreamed of seducing since their senior year together at boarding school.

Mary's outfit was smart and sober. She seemed prepared for a longer day than the rest of us. Her tartan skirt made me acutely aware of how cold the air was around my earlobes. Marco looked robust and happier than usual. His hair style resembled Hugh Grant's more than ever, and he wore horn-rimmed eyeglasses that added years of unearned learning to to his expression, as though Anna Karinina has always made sense to him in all of her complexity and desires, even though I knew he had never once cracked the novel.

"I was thinking we'd do Central Park first, since we're likely to be murdered there if we linger too long after lunch, and then maybe the Twin Towers after that?" His arms moved around in sweeping circles, wild gesticulations that were far too energetic for a tourist-day in the city. We all laughed at the irony.

Marco's infectious mania for making it through the day never failed to mesmerize everyone around him. On the subway Kate said to me, "It's like he's a personality phoenix, melting himself down from one outburst to the next and then instantly regenerating." The park was exhiliharating and Marco wasted no time in comparing it to the English Garden in Munich. He pranced up to a woman walking a labrador retriever and began quoting the first sentence of The Metamorphosis in German. Kate and Mary laughed aloud and I realized how much I had missed him. Around two o'clock we entered the subway and took the E train to the end-stop in lower Manhattan.

In the rear corner of the elevator at One World Trade Center - on the way up to the observation deck, uncomfortable and cramped behind Japanese tourists and a youth group from Mississippi whose hooded sweatshirts shared a comforting message - God Is Good: All The Time, in navy bold print - Marco told me he was considering changing jobs.

"I hate it at Deutsche Bank. There are a handful of women there worth taking home, but mostly it's a den of workaholics, no sense of humor. Guys who think it's odd that I talk to my parents in Italian and watch soccer matches every other weekend in the same Midtown bar."

"What about a job in Rome? You always talked about going home, meeting some Roman woman with the crows-feet Gucci pumps and the - how did you put it exactly - 'embattled way of walking down the street?'"

His face made a smirk that said he was proud of me for keeping up.

"Believe it or not," he said, "I'll be here in two moths."

"No you won't."

"I'm serious! Remember Emanual, he graduated in my class and you met him last summer? The guy whose father owns that restaurant in Beverly Hills I was telling you about? Well he works at a hedge fund in this building on the 90th floor. We should stop and see him if we can after we're done at the top. Anyway, he said getting me a gig would be an afterthought. Imagine that view. Imagine making love to a bellisima against a window with that view in relief." He paused, and then, "Performance art, through and through! Living, writhing frescoes!"

We both cracked up and I punched him hard in the shoulder.

The elevator opened into an enclosed lobby that wound in a contiguous rectangle around the inner walls of the observation deck. We stepped through the royal blue lobby into the solid brightness outside. Marco desposited a quarter into a viewing apparatus and declared he could see my innocence shivering far away atop the roof of an apartment highrise on the Upper West Side. "Better go get it back," he joked. Of course I laughed. Kate laughed too.

And then I ran my fingertips across the small disc of metal on my coat. It felt noble and textured in the cold. Marco held Mary as they looked into the future, private futures they could weigh privately in public. He must have seen it scrawled in sunlight like a miracle on the contorted faces of steel and glass far across the island - imperfect and near, enormous and remote. New York as Fitzgerald dreamed of seeing the New World, somehow unspoiled and shimmering in possibility. Skyscrapers and ghettoes stood still below us like uncut spruce forests as the base of an Alaskan mountain.

We were anxious because we knew our lives were scattered and hiding in the shadows of streets across the city. The streets we could not see, the ones we risked never finding as each late afternoon awoke inside the belly of the next. Daylight to unfelt darkness to daylight again. The Japanese tourists didn't even try to stop the reflex - they just smiled out of an ancient biological duty. Kate's cheeks were flushed because she was cold and in love with the idea of the rest of her life feeling like it did at that moment, clear and pure and high atop the 110th story.

When the button fell, I heard it hit the concrete before I felt it was gone.